by Brian Moore
‘Janice,’ I said, ‘do you remember “mange la merde” one night on St James Street, long, long ago?’
‘No. What was that?’ And I told her and she laughed and nodded and held me and for a moment we were old friends, arm-linked, remembering.
‘Those awful winters,’ I said. ‘Just think. Those were the days of Duplessis.’ I saw Duplessis’ face as I said his name, the face of a cheap dictator, a tinpot, provincial tyrant. In my time, he ran Quebec. I hated him, his graft, his crooked government, his arrogance, but, more than that, I hated the fact that most people, and particularly those English-Canadian industrialists, paid graft to him, encouraged him, and feared him.
‘And that slogan of his,’ Janice said. ‘ “Notre maître, le passé”.’
‘And everybody went along with him. Even Canada’s Own.’
She nodded. ‘It’s all so different now,’ she said. ‘Those days are gone for ever, thank goodness.’
‘I know. I’m glad he’s dead. I’m glad to see his name wiped out,’ I said. ‘But that Montreal, Duplessis’ Montreal, is the only one I know. And it doesn’t exist any more. When I go back now, nine years later, I don’t know the place. It makes me feel old.’
‘I know. Me too,’ she said, but she was just saying it to agree with me, it cannot be like that for her, for she had never left Montreal, the city has aged for her as a husband’s face ages, she sees it every day, she is not aware that it’s completely different from the Montreal of nine years ago. But, for me it is gone, my old Montreal. That is true of all my old towns. I move away and they change and, in their changing, they die and so live only in my memory. Memento ergo sunt. Remembering Montreal, there in the park, I felt I had become the Wandering Jew, the Flying Dutchman. Down Tilt. ‘Janice,’ I said. ‘I really must go and lie down. Let’s make a date to meet tomorrow, all right?’
She looked at me, at last believing me. ‘Poor you, you’re shaking.’
She noticed my hand. Bad tremor. ‘Doesn’t mean anything,’ I lied to her. ‘Call me tomorrow, I’ll probably be feeling better then. And why don’t you go and have a look at the Turner show this afternoon? It might take your mind off this other stuff.’
She nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it might. And you’re right, it’s better not to get involved again with Perry.’
My turn to nod agreement.
‘As for the fur coat,’ she said, ‘maybe I should think about that, too. No sense doing something silly.’
I nodded again. Emphatically.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Perhaps, after all, a divorce is the only solution.’
‘Please, Janice. Try to forget it for today. Call me tomorrow. I’m sorry to poop out on you like this.’
‘Do you want a lift?’ she asked. ‘I’m going to take a cab and go back to my hotel and freshen up.’ I told her no, we’d be going in opposite directions. Then I walked her down to Central Park West where she went into her now familiar kamikaze act to get a cab. And, as she turned to get into the cab, she held me and kissed my cheek. ‘Oh, Mary,’ she said. ‘You’re still my best friend, do you know that?’
What could I say to this lie? I nodded and smiled, but I was trembling as she held me. Hat. Look what you did to him. I stood with a forced smile on my lips, those words of hers in my head as she waved from her cab and the cab moved off and I crossed the street, going towards the bus stop. In a Down Tilt; the dooms again. Look what you did to him.
‘New York,’ Hat said. ‘Again? I didn’t realize you’d be commuting back there every month. What is it, this time?’ I told him an audition for an acting job; it was an explanation that had always satisfied him in the past but now that Angus McMurtry had warned me that someone had been talking to Hat, I was awkward in my lie. Anyway, Hat’s nose began to twitch in a way I’d learned to hate. (He had become a cross, edgy person since he gave up the booze.) And there, in that half-furnished living-room in Montreal, in a house he’d just made a down payment on, he glared at me like an old-fashioned Victorian husband and said, ‘Well, you’re not going, that’s all.’ It was so unlike him, I laughed and said, ‘For goodness sake, don’t be ridiculous. Since when did you order me around?’ Risked saying it because, even then, I couldn’t quite believe Angus’s warning that someone had talked to Hat. How could they? Nobody knew. It all happened (when it did happen) five hundred miles away in New York and nobody I knew knew Terence, which was why I risked laughing in Hat’s face. And when I asked since when did he order me around, Hat said, ‘Since now.’ I asked him who did he think he was, talking to me like that, and he looked at me with those sad dog eyes and answered, ‘I’m your husband and it seems I’m too old for your taste. You want kids now, don’t you?’
I misunderstood. I thought he was talking about having children. Hat had never wanted children with me: he already had his son, Pete. We had talked about it and I’d said that was all right with me. So I was angry at his bringing it up like this and I said, ‘Look, you’re the one who brought this up. We’ve agreed. You don’t want kids. Fine. I’m perfectly happy. I’m not going to New York out of spite or anything like that.’
‘I’m not talking about babies,’ he said. ‘I’m talking about Beatles. You know the one I mean. Lavery, isn’t that his name?’
‘What?’ I said. When I said that ‘what?’ my face must have told him the thing he wanted to know, confirmed the thing Janice had told him, for he nodded as if I’d said yes.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘If you go to New York, don’t bother to come back.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘I won’t.’
And today, I remembered that, as I stood at the bus stop after saying goodbye to Janice who had just told me I was still her best friend. Janice who does not know that I now know she was the one who told Hat. And thinking of it, waiting for the bus, I began to tremble, very badly. I was standing behind a mother with a small child and, behind me, shuffling his clipboard, arranging his textbooks, all the time inspecting my legs, was a pimply student-type in a Columbia University windbreaker. I remember as I waited for the bus I was thinking how Hat followed me into the room that night when I began to pack and how that was my mistake, packing I mean, for it gave Hat a chance to talk to me some more. And gave me a chance to say the things that, I suppose, killed Hat.
Look what you did to him, Janice said, and I was still thinking about that, thinking about that night, when the bus came and interrupted my thought. The mother got on with her child, then fumbled, finding her change, while I stood on the second step of the bus, holding my quarter, waiting for her to move on inside. Behind me, the student-type moved on to the bottom step and, accidentally on purpose, rested the back of his hand against my thigh. I moved, but there was no room for manoeuvre and was it worthwhile to start something? Besides, I felt too trembly to deal with him. Ahead of me the money receptacle, spun by the bus driver, revolved its little treadmill, chasing down the mother’s change, clearing the box to receive my fare. The mother moved on down the aisle, pushing her little boy ahead of her as I, released from the student’s surreptitious touch, stepped up and offered my quarter. The driver took the quarter, made change on his change machine, spilling two dimes and a nickel into my palm. I put a nickel and a dime into the fare box and as the driver spun the treadmill, chasing my money down, I turned to look at Hail Columbia, he of the nudging knuckles who now, holy as an altar boy, ignored me to stare up at a transit advertisement which asked him if he would like a career in the Coast Guard. I moved down the bus, which was half empty, picked a seat on the right-hand side, and sat down, seeing my reflection in the window pane as the doors whirred shut. The bus moved out into traffic and my face’s reflection in the bus window floated glassily over the shapes of passing buildings and passing cars, floated past trees and buds of spring foliage as the bus entered Central Park. Your face, my thane, is as a book where men may read strange matters. My face in the glass was Macbeth’s, the face of the murderer, and no matter how I tried not to think of that nig
ht I could not exorcize it. I cannot make it go away once it has entered my mind; my purgatory is that I am compelled to relive it from the time Hat came into the bedroom that night as I was packing and said, ‘Look, are you sick or something? I’ve been thinking. Maybe you’re the one needs a few skull sessions with old Angus? Not me.’
‘Why am I sick?’ I asked and he replied, ‘Don’t you think it’s sick to be running down to New York to go to bed with a kid who’s only half your age?’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘It’s true, isn’t it?’
‘No, it’s not true. And even if it were, why would that be sick?’
‘If you have to ask why,’ he said. ‘I mean, there’s the answer. Good God, Mary, weren’t two husbands enough for you, do you have to go robbing cradles as well?’
‘Stop it, Hat,’ I said. (I felt Mad Twin rise up inside me but I kept her down.) ‘Go away, Hat,’ I told him. ‘There are things I don’t want to say.’
‘What things?’ His eyes, dog-brown and beaten, changed as he asked it, became, as in those first days I knew him, fine, angry eyes, luminous as the eyes in a Rembrandt portrait. He sat down on the edge of the bed and knitted his fingers around one kneecap, swinging his long leg. ‘What things?’ he asked again, eager to hear, self-destructive, as always.
Gentlemen of the jury, I remember distinctly that on that very night as I packed for New York I was, as now, on the point of having the Curse, Mad Twin was in charge, I know it, I was not myself. But that excuse will not satisfy me. I am my own judge, it is still mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, for the next thing I did was tell him in one long tirade, throwing clothes into my suitcase at the beginning of it, then, forgetting the clothes, simply standing facing him in that almost bare bedroom as he sat, gripping his kneecap, his long leg swinging at first, then dangling limp, quiet, quiet, as he listened to the truth, the whole truth at last, so help me. I started by recalling our very first time in La Salle Hotel, me coming out of the bathroom naked, both of us naked and the panic that it wasn’t quite right, that we were faking it, that it was not what we had hoped, yet how we lied to each other that it was, and I told him how that lie had come back to plague us, year in, year out, every time we made love to each other, for, no matter what the time or place, it was never right between us. And how, after a while, it had become for me, at least, a sort of death, a foreknowledge that each time we approached each other naked, something would be faked, something would be sad and false. For (I said to him) when sex cannot be made new, it cannot be made, and all attempts to fake it are a cancer. I said I had become resigned to that cancer, I told him I had no hopes of there ever being anything different in my life. I had not expected Terence and even with Terence I had not ever hoped it would be as perfect as it was and, I remember, Hat stopped me at that point, his face frightening in sudden, flushed anger, his eyes black as murder and he shouting, ‘Fuck Terence, fucking Terence, what’s his name? Terence Lavatory.’ And laughed like a lunatic, repeating, ‘Lavatory, yes, Lavatory, yes, that’s the name.’ Then raised his hand as though he would slap my face, but did not. And shouted, ‘You know what you are, you’re a bitch, a bitch, you don’t give a curse about affection or love or marriage or any normal, decent emotion, all you want is to be fucked, fucked, fucked, until the come is running out of you, that’s why you left poor Phelan, because he couldn’t satisfy you, and now you’re running out on me for the same reason and after this poor Beatle bugger has fucked you blind, you’ll ditch him too, but I’ll tell you something, you’ll have your day of reckoning, even you can’t go on for ever, you know. You’ll wind up like every other sick bitch – paying for it. Say, six Beatles from now.’
‘Have you finished?’ I said.
‘No, I haven’t. Jesus Christ, you’re obscene. I’ll bet you don’t know a goddam thing about this poor Beatle kid, he could be anybody at all, what’s it matter to you? All you want is a stud, right?’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘I don’t know much about Terence, come to think of it. He’s not like you, he hasn’t informed me about every girl he’s ever slept with. In fact, I know very little about him. Outside of bed. Whereas you, I know you out of bed, but the you I meet in bed is somebody I never know and won’t ever know. Now, if that makes me a bitch and bed the most important thing in my life, all right, that’s the way it is. I’ve changed, Hat. I’ve grown up. I want something more than a dirty little sex fantasy when I lie down to make love. I suppose that’s what I’m trying to tell you. It’s late. I’m twenty-nine. But, better later than never.’
‘With the Boy Wonder,’ he said, his face pricked by rage. ‘With Terence Lavatory.’
‘Yes, with Terence,’ I said.
‘Terence, your saviour.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Terence is my saviour, I shall not want, he maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he restoreth my soul. Yes, that’s right. He’s my new religion. He’s life after death.’
‘And to complete the analogy,’ Hat said, ‘I am death, right?’
‘Right,’ I said. I was shaking, I had thrown my bomb, I had blown everything up. But Hat was very quiet now. He sat on the edge of the bed, stretched his long legs out straight and examined the toes of his shoes. Then stood up, not looking at me, and went back into the living-room. I went to the closet and got my coat and handbag. I walked into the front hall and, as I did, Hat came out of the living-room and crossed the hall in front of me, going into the kitchen. He had an unopened bottle of Scotch in his hand and was tearing off the tinfoil. He did not look at me. I opened the front door, then hesitated and looked back into the kitchen. The last time I ever saw Hat Bell he was standing in the bare kitchen of that house he had hoped to buy. He’d taken down a glass from the cupboard above him and was pouring Scotch into the glass. He must have heard me open the front door, but he did not look up. He raised the glass. He drank. I left.
Through the glass panel of the bus window, my face slid past the façade of the Metropolitan Museum. My bus had crossed the park from West Side to East and now I was reminded that the Met, for me, is Terence. The Met where we met. Even today, sitting on the bus in the Hat dooms, the sight of the Met raised me in joy, remembering thee, O Terence, remembering how I would begin to run as I drew near the main entrance for I was always early for our secret meetings, I’d know it was too soon for you to be there, so I would walk into the main hall, past the guards who check to see what you’re carrying in, and up to the bronze statue of the naked man. He is, perhaps, the Emperor Trebonianus Gallus, but no one knows for sure. There used to be a bench beneath him. I used to sit on that bench. When Tee arrived he would always know where to find me. Under the naked man.
People who get on the bus at the 79th Street stop are usually people who have been to the museum – art students, tourists, Europeans, Japanese. But the woman who sat in beside me today with her little daughter on her knee, I doubt if she had ever been inside the Met. She seemed Puerto Rican, with a tired yellow face. Perched on her mother’s knee, the little girl stared at me with chocolate-drop eyes, examining me as I examined her. She looked at my mustard suit. I looked at her dress which was white with a lace collar, probably her first communion dress let out. They had pierced her little ears and fitted them out with ugly, tiny gold earrings. How old was she? Nine? Hers was the Juarez face: it could be Mexican. No matter which country they come from down there, they are Indians, with that Indian face, the face of the three little girls of my Juarez dooms, the three little girls who sat on the public bench in the Plaza San Jacinto on that dry, dusty afternoon in El Paso. They had the same stare this child had, the stare that judges without judging. Two years ago (my God, is it two years already?) in the Plaza San Jacinto in El Paso, Texas, three little Indian girls stared me into the dooms. Remember them dooms? Please God, let me forget them. Dry hot winds blow down through Texas, down to the Mexican border, rushing into El Paso del Norte, filling its streets and squares with dust. A borde
r town; it made me think of a cheap army surplus store. At noon, lawyer Guzman’s jitney brought half a dozen of us back to it from Ciudad Juarez and our quick divorces, the jitney crossing Cordova bridge over the muddy ditch that is the Rio Grande, past the US customs building and along a long, dusty road to a bus terminal where the bus from Mexico was unloading people with Indian faces, poor people who crossed the street from the bus terminal like pilgrims going to a shrine, the shrine a long block of cheap clothing, furniture and appliance stores, filled with shoddy goods ‘Made in the USA’.