Things As They Are?
Page 10
University had come as a dreadful shock to her. Suddenly she found herself demoted to ordinary. The professors did not listen respectfully to her opinions in class the way her high-school teachers had, and the boys favoured her with perfunctory attentions. In residence, on her floor alone, there were two girls better dressed than she was. At the end of two months, Pam was so desperately unhappy that she seriously considered returning home to let her father arrange a job for her in the local bank.
Then an acquaintance took her to a house party. Within an hour of arriving, the acquaintance was picked up by an engineering student and disappeared, leaving Pam to fend for herself. As she ranged through rooms plugged with strangers, looking for a familiar face, Pam bumped into a shy-looking boy with a gentle voice. This was Ray and he swiftly put Pam at ease by appreciating her the way she was used to being appreciated. In no time at all she confided to Ray her father’s foolish insistence that all her Best Actress trophies be lined up on the mantel for the whole world to see. It was so embarrassing! He was also treated to a blow by blow account of her troubles editing the high-school year book. The evening flew by for both of them.
There was nothing much attractive about Ray. His rear end was still too big, his thighs too plump, and his face too innocent to be appealing to any woman under the age of forty. But his fervent devotion outweighed these handicaps and gave Pam a new lease on life. She found it possible to continue. They dated through all four years of university, although several times Pam broke it off. On each of these occasions Ray begged her to take him back and she consented – without Ray she felt common, plain, neglected. A month after they graduated Ray landed a job as a government accountant and she agreed to marry him.
Pam harboured ill will against her father-in-law from the start. The size of the cheque he presented as a wedding gift struck her as insulting. Added to that there was the annoyance of Ray having to repay a student loan.
“Why is it that your father didn’t help you through university?” she asked Ray one day.
“Why?” Ray said. “Because he hasn’t any money. He’s just a working stiff.”
“But I thought you mentioned he bought his R. V. while you were going to school.”
“I guess he did,” said Ray.
“It’s nice he had his priorities straight,” said Pam.
Ray began to wonder if there mightn’t be something to what Pam said. He became less eager to phone his parents long distance when Pam called attention to the fact that it was Ray who always called, never his dad. Other sore spots developed. When Ray got a promotion after three years of work with the government he looked forward to impressing his father with the news. The old man interrupted him in mid-sentence and commenced his own story about how an expensive piece of machinery had been wrecked by the carelessness of a young miner. “The young ones are no damn good,” he concluded. “I’m sure it’s the same in your business.” Ray would never have stopped to think that he, too, qualified as a “young one” if Pam hadn’t pointed it out to him.
These insights of his wife’s sometimes made him sad, but Ray was not a man inclined to dwell on the gloomy side of life; he consoled himself with his good fortune in having a woman like Pam to love. It was true that life was not always a bed of roses with Pam, she sometimes caught the blues and Ray had to do his cheerful best to raise her sinking spirits or keep her from turning sour. When she complained that her anthropology degree made her unemployable, condemned her to housewifery, Ray suggested perhaps she would like to return to school. When she charged six years of marriage with causing her to gain forty pounds, Ray assured her that she was every bit as beautiful and desirable as she had ever been.
“Can’t you see how upsetting it is to me?” she would scream at him. “I’m not beautiful. I’m fat. You only say I’m beautiful so you won’t have to talk about my problems with me. You’re just like your father, Ray. You don’t care about anybody but yourself. You’d tell me anything in the hope it would shut me up. You’re selfish and uncaring – just like him.”
It had been hard for Ray to accept Pam’s view of his father but now that he did, he felt no hatred for him. Instead, he felt an odd shame, like the man who discovers he has been invited to a party because there was no way of not inviting him. As much for his father’s sake as his own, Ray began to avoid him.
Shortly after Ray and Pam celebrated their seventh wedding anniversary, steering clear of his father became easier. His parents, two old gypsies, moved again, to Pine Point in the Northwest Territories. The distance between them, a distance compounded by bad roads and the horrors of winter driving, gave Ray a plausible excuse for paying fewer visits. This was a satisfactory solution for a time, then Ray began to be plagued by mysterious premonitions of a disaster about to befall his father. As a small boy, he had known children whose fathers or brothers had been killed in mine accidents, and the possibility that one day the mine would slay or maim his father had always been there. Now it came forward and took possession of him. He imagined electrocutions, catastrophic explosions, cave-ins, entanglements with machinery. Whenever the imagined scenes became too real, too horrific, he would phone Pine Point. If he got his mother, he would speak. If his father answered, he simply hung up, comforted to know he was all right. Pam began to question him about the phone bill. “Five calls to Pine Point in two weeks? Why Ray?”
Two years after his parents moved north, the news Ray had been dreading broke. It didn’t matter that his father wasn’t killed in an accident at the mine but had drowned in a boating mishap, Ray couldn’t shake the guilty feeling that somehow his dark reveries had dragged his poor father down through fathoms of icy water to his death.
Pam reminded Ray that life goes on and waits for no man. That he was responsible for managing his loss. But every time Ray made a step in that direction he suffered cruel setbacks. The worst was his mother’s treachery. He encouraged her to move south after the funeral but she refused. The beauty of the north was in her blood, she said, Pine Point was home, she was perfectly happy where she was and knew her own mind, thank you very much. Not long after the first anniversary of his father’s drowning Ray discovered what had really got into his mother’s blood – a mechanic at the mine. In a tremulously defiant voice, she told Ray over the telephone that she and this man were getting married. Ray was not a person to be rude and cutting to anyone, let alone his own mother. But he was shocked and hurt by what she was doing – for his father’s sake.
According to Pam he was acting like a child. “If you ask me,” she said, “you ought to be glad your mother is getting married. At least she has someone to look after her and save you the worry. Besides, everyone deserves a chance at happiness.”
Ray demanded to know what that was supposed to mean.
“Oh, nothing. Except that you never really saw how it was with your parents. You know, your mother was never happy with him.”
“What do you know about it?” said Ray, using a peevish tone of voice Pam seldom heard.
“I know habit is only habit. It isn’t love.”
Ray credited two things – Pam and the grind of his professional life – with keeping him in balance. He was thankful for both. For nine years he had worked in government service, slowly and steadily riding a wave of modest promotions. There was no man better suited to the task he was called upon to perform than Ray; his unflinching doggedness and diligence were bywords in the office. The most recalcitrant accounting foul-ups were turned over to him to solve, tough nuts that never yielded to a single blow but only the most persistent knocking and rapping. He worked calmly and methodically on all problems, often remaining at his desk long after he had cheerfully waved his colleagues out the door. He did not begrudge the extra hours in the least, except for the inconvenience they caused his wife. To make up for this, Ray was always ready with small gifts, flowers, and dinners out in expensive restaurants.
It was at Ray’s prompting that Pam renewed an old interest from high-school days and joined an
amateur theatre group. To Ray’s delight, his wife came to life, seemed happier than ever before. She enjoyed her new circle of friends and even shed twenty-five pounds so that she could get a crack at better parts. As she said to Ray, “It’s difficult to play Blanche Du Bois tipping the scales at one-sixty.”
What particularly gladdened Ray’s heart was the revelation that his wife could really act. Of course, he didn’t rely on his taste to come to this conclusion, Ray realized that he didn’t know beans about good acting. But from the way she was treated at cast parties, or at the readings sometimes held in the living room of their home, he could see that everyone respected Pam, even deferred to her. She was on her way to becoming a star in the small world of local theatre. Now it seemed she was out more evenings than he was himself, always at rehearsals, attending productions of the local professional company, or taking part in something curiously called workshops. Her happiness was proclaimed by a more flamboyant style of dress and the variety of accents in which she spoke to him, English, Irish, even German. When she said she was on her way to becoming a new person, Ray could well believe it. Sometimes he didn’t know her himself.
Then she got her break, the artistic director of the city’s one professional company offered her a role. It was a small part, the nurse in Equus, but for the first time in her life Pam would be paid to act. Equus played for two weeks, and during the course of the run, Ray attended four performances. He joked to the other accountants that if he went to all fourteen, he still wouldn’t know what the play was supposed to be about, he was that dense.
At the end of those two weeks, Pam left him. Ray came home late from work and found a fat envelope resting on the kitchen table with his name on it. The long letter inside explained that it had nothing to do with him and everything to do with her. The last two months of auditions, rehearsals, and the show itself had been a process of awakening from an interminable, dreary sleep. At last she knew what she must do with her life. She must act.
What was important for Ray to understand was that this was nobody’s fault. Their marriage had been doomed from the beginning because it had linked two incompatible natures, the practical and the artistic. Only the suppression and denial of her true, artistic nature had permitted the marriage to survive. She did not blame Ray that this relationship had nurtured him while she withered like a plant denied light and water, nothing was to be gained from finger pointing. But now they must go their separate ways. The cruellest thing he could do would be to try to dissuade her from “following her bliss.” There was more in the letter, dealing with the practical matters that were supposed to be his specialty. Pam had withdrawn half of the money held in their joint account and suggested that the house be sold as soon as possible so the proceeds could be divided. She could not see him but he must promise to take care of himself.
Ray took this badly but also, as was his habit, very quietly. In private he sometimes grew frantic, turning this way and that in his mind, seeking a way out, but his gaze always came to rest on a blank wall. When he studied a column of figures or read a newspaper or made himself a meal in the tiny bachelor apartment he rented after the house was sold, the wall was there, forcing its blankness upon him. Ray’s face grew haggard and grey from twisting his neck in a futile effort to see beyond and behind the wall, to wherever Pam had gone. In time, this failure turned his stare apathetic and rubbed the innocence out of his face.
Nobody knew his wife had left him. If he had a friend, Ray would not likely have said anything to him anyway, because he could not believe this was happening to him. He would get Pam back. People in the office saw very well what was happening to him, that he was losing weight and making mistakes at his work that no one would have believed Ray Matthews capable of. Most of all, they noted the haunting change in his face.
When things were at their worst, he heard Pam’s voice in the kitchen one morning when he was shaving. It was months since he had seen or heard her and the sound of her voice made him shake so violently that he had to lay his razor down so as not to slash himself. Then it came to him what it was. Pam hadn’t come home to him. She was being interviewed on the local CBC morning radio show.
Ray stood absolutely still, intent, and as he listened to the disembodied voice of his wife, something strange began to happen. He heard the electrical whir and chatter of wheels speeding over flimsy rails, the clink of ice rocking against the sides of a tumbler, his father shouting funny things to him in a raw voice, the laughter of a small boy who could not guess or imagine the harsh territory his father had crossed to find himself standing where he stood that night. Ray could guess now, having been on a similar journey, now completed.
Pam’s voice returned from the other room, talking about some man called Ibsen. Over all the months of separation her voice had changed, or his way of hearing it had. Coming out of the void, how false, how insincere it sounded, how actressy. It struck Ray that the owner of such a voice might not know all there was to know. Something more had passed between him and his father, borne on his dead brother’s train, than a mere exchange of drinks and loose change. What, was for him to decide.
With that thought, Ray picked up his razor and set about uncovering his face.
New Houses
1957 WAS THE YEAR the Americans arrived. The men came first, engineers, accountants, managers, shift captains to organize and oversee the construction of the mine. Their wives and children would follow later, when proper, suitable houses had been built for them.
Del Cutter, his wife Marge, and their son Sammy were the Americans’ closest neighbours and saw all of it, from the beginning. In the time before the Company, an open field had faced the Cutter place, a three-room house sided in imitation brick they had lived in ever since Sammy was born. Then the Company bought the field opposite for a housing site, earth-moving equipment roared and rumbled, tracing roads, crescents, bays. Next the water mains were laid. By June the basements were dug and the old pasture where Sammy had wandered about collecting burrs and fox tails in his socks was dotted with heaps of brown earth thrown up by the excavations. Concrete for the basements was poured and the carpenters started framing the houses. The shriek of power-saws, the hammering, the shouting of men back and forth went on for as long as there was summer light to work by. Only on Sundays was the site deserted and quiet. Sundays, the Cutter family crossed the road to admire the new houses.
They would walk the hard-packed dirt roads and gaze at the Americans’ houses, split levels and ranch-style bungalows mostly, the kind of houses their owners had grown accustomed to in New Mexico and Texas. Time after time Sammy’s mother would halt dead in the middle of the road, shade her eyes with her hand and stand motionless, staring at the unroofed frame through which the sun could be seen sinking, burning between the ribs of the skeleton house like a fiery heart. Then she would fold her arms underneath her breasts and walk on to the next house like a woman moving from picture to picture in a gallery, deep in contemplation.
On these outings Sammy sensed something strange in the air. He couldn’t put a name to it but the feeling was like the happy expectancy that came with waiting for Christmas. Perplexed by his excitement, he ran about, showing off, scrambling up the big piles of dirt, screaming “I’m the king of the castle,” then crazily tearing down, arms pin wheeling, an avalanche of clods and stones bouncing at his heels. Or he’d quietly burrow his hands into the sand which was dumped in driveways to be used for mixing concrete, working his fingers past the dry, hot crust, deeper and deeper until the sand grew cool and surprisingly moist to the touch. And whether he was noisy or silent, his mother paid him not the slightest attention, but walked the raw, empty streets as if she were half-asleep. Sometimes she asked his father questions.
“When do you think they’ll come?”
“Who?”
“The Americans.”
Her husband always squinted his eyes when considering a question, in the fashion of country people. “Beats me,” he said.
Not u
ntil they had gone up and down each street once, sometimes twice, did they turn back to their own house and beds.
What people said was that Del Cutter was a hard man to figure. He was a dandy worker but it didn’t do him much good because he never took go-ahead jobs. Winters he was the caretaker at the rink and an acknowledged wizard at pebbling a sheet of curling ice, none better. But almost any job would have paid more than caretaker at the rink. Summers he mostly worked out on farms. If a farmer got behind with his seeding, or fencing, or summer fallowing, Del Cutter was there to give him a week’s worth of solid work before moving on to the next man who needed a hand. But it was the same thing all over again. It didn’t pay. Still, Del never complained. The job at the rink suited him because there was nobody over him there; he was his own boss. And the way he worked summers suited him because with so many bosses he could always tell one to go fuck himself if he felt like it. Cutter was a proud, hot, touchy sort. He preferred not being tied to any one man’s pleasure or displeasure. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket was how he reasoned.
One morning, up early to get a few poplar sticks from the wood pile to kindle the breakfast fire in the woodstove, Marge Cutter paused and studied the men outlined against the cloudless blue sky, roofing the houses. Later in the day, while pumping water at the well to do her laundry, she overran the bucket and soaked her shoes because she had forgot what she was about, mechanically driving the handle up and down while studying the New Houses. That was how she spoke of them now, with capitals in her voice. She could hardly wait to see them finished, everything of the very best, clean and bright and shining.