Sharon Butala
Real Life
short stories
In memory
of
Caroline Heath
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Real Life
Night Class
Keeping House
Random Acts
Thief of Souls
Saskatchewan
Gravity
Postmodernism
Light
Winterkill
Acknowledgements
Books by Sharon Butala
About the Publisher
Real Life
When I saw Dan enter the gallery where I was having a show, my knees went weak and I had to lean against the wall, casually, as if I were tiring of standing. In the unexpectedness of his appearance, a sudden memory engulfed me, more physical than anything—a kind of blooming of sensation around and in me, of smell and texture and colour—of how we had been together. It made my face feel hot, yet my fingertips against my wineglass shrank with cold.
When he spotted me, he approached, dodging people and sidling between them, and we stood, staring at each other, he with his hands thrust into the pockets of his raincoat, the shoulders spotted with rain, and me not knowing whether to smile or weep. The people I’d been talking to drifted away, one with a quick, speculative glance at me, the other carefully masking his expression before he turned away. I murmured, “Dan! Hello,” in a breathy, pleased voice filled with surprise and, I suppose, my uncertainty. I held myself ready to brush his cheek with mine or maybe hug him, but he stopped too far away, and made no move to come closer.
“Edie,” he said heavily, a name no one else calls me, so that even in my confusion I was touched with tenderness toward him. But he was looking around the small space packed with people sipping wine as if to find a quiet corner for us. “We can’t talk here,” he decided, firm, and his eyes shifted to a spot on the wall between paintings, briefly, while I waited, hardly breathing, hearing around us the tinkle of laughter rising above the steady buzz of voices. “I’ll be at that café across the street at—say, eleven—tomorrow morning?”
He had been the most beautiful young man, on the small side, and with perfect, fine-boned features, as delicately fashioned as a woman’s, but with a masculine quality, a combination I tried and tried to suggest in drawings and on canvas and never succeeded. Critics have labelled my work “passionate”; one had already referred to this show—nudes, all—as “brutal,” which, to tell the truth, rather pleased me. Now I saw that the delicacy of line in Dan’s face was blurred and thickened. All that booze, I thought, saddened, and then felt a twinge of nasty satisfaction and was immediately ashamed. It was a moment before I could get my mouth to shape a reply.
“All right,” I said. “At eleven.” My wineglass was suddenly too heavy to hold and I looked around futilely for a place to put it down. I turned back to him and saw that something, some intensity, had gone out of his eyes. They slid away from my face in an odd way, as if now he couldn’t recall what he was doing here, and I wondered suddenly if he were ill—some terrible, life-threatening illness, I thought. But already he’d turned from me and was making his slow way out of the gallery. A few people, recognizing him, turned their heads to watch him go. He hadn’t spoken again, and he hadn’t looked at one of my paintings. I almost gave one of those quick snorts of mixed dismay, humiliation, and anger, but caught myself in time. I’d built up my women with a deliberate bruised raggedness, using a palette knife and dark colours to just hint at an undiscovered opulence, and now it seemed to me their eyes followed him, unblinking and filled with apprehension.
Dan and I had married when we were still students, me at the art school and Dan at the university on the other side of the city. We fell hard for each other, and we got married, because that’s what you did then. Just a quick Justice of the Peace thing, telling no one, not even our parents. Dan had only an alcoholic father whom he blamed for his mother’s too-early death, and I’d run away from home at sixteen. By that time I knew that I preferred any kind of life to the one I’d been raised in, and so I prepared myself, knew where I was going, what I would do to survive, took every precaution not to be found, including changing Edith-May to Raine (I used to love that glamorous e I’d put on the end), and adopting Hamilton, my grandmother’s maiden name. Thinking back to that scared, determined teenager, I believe I chose a family name, knowing it was dangerous, because a tiny part of me was afraid to float completely free. I’ve never missed my father or my brothers, and my mother only once in a while—or maybe what I feel when I think of her is really longing for the mother I wish she’d been—but I have often missed the farm. More, in fact, now that I’m older—the colour and movement of the aspen forest behind the house, the sound of the wind whispering through the leaves, a certain smoky scent in the air that comes in the fall sometimes, even here in the city. Dan and I were married only a couple of years and, except for book covers or in the newspaper, I hadn’t seen him in—it must be nearly thirty years.
I was sitting down across from him before he realized I’d arrived. I’d put a scarf over my short, unruly white hair—it’s been white since I turned forty, a family curse, I like to say—put on dark glasses and, leaving my caftans, billowing pants, bracelets, and rings at home, wore dark cotton slacks and a sweatshirt under an old raincoat I’d found in the back of my closet. I was aware that this was some sort of statement, but I was too agitated to figure out what I was trying to say: We have no secrets? You matter this little to me now? As far as I could tell he was dressed no differently than he’d been the night before. I suddenly remembered that he’d liked clothes once, when he was young, nice sportscoats, trim slacks, he could take an hour to pick just the right shirt and tie. I’d loved that then, even if at the same time it had made me faintly uneasy. That he no longer cared about how he dressed didn’t surprise me.
“On time?” he said, looking up. He didn’t smile. “That’s not like you.” I thought, Is that all you remember about me? but I didn’t say anything. He was sitting sideways to me, his still-skinny legs extended, one arm resting on the table. He nodded to the waitress; she came over and put a cup of coffee in front of me.
“Let’s start again,” I said, holding my voice steady. I took off my sunglasses, set them on the table, and gave him my best social smile. “It’s been a long time. Congratulations on another book on the bestseller list. So nice of you to look me up.”
“I didn’t look you up,” he told me, and gave a small, sour laugh. “I’m here to do a reading at the university. I’m at that hotel down the street—I walked past the gallery. I saw your name. On impulse, I went in.”
“You could have gone on by,” I said. When he didn’t answer, the anxiety that had been building in me since the night before, that I thought I’d been containing pretty well, seeped out, and I said briskly, “What is it you want, then, if it isn’t to go over fond memories?”
“You know it’s been twenty-five years since Willie died.” My mouth began unexpectedly to tremble—I should have known it would be about this—and I bent my head to hide it. What had I expected? I was asking myself, and had to fight down anger, mixed with something I recognized as self-pity. He expelled the air from his chest, then filled it again noisily.
“I—heard,” I said, “as soon as it … happened.” One crazed letter from John (whose real name was Vladimir, he was an escapee like me), blaming me for everything. Then years and years of silence, Dan—I’d read this in a magazine—struggling with alcoholism until his rehabilitation, maybe a dozen years ago now. “I’m very sorry.” It came out a whisper and I cleared my throat.
“Do you know where John is?” he asked, for the first time turning his head to look
directly at me. I was in control again, and spoke as casually as I could, as if it were nothing to me.
“He teaches history in Halifax, at some Catholic college.” I saw then that he knew this and had merely wondered if I did. In the silence that followed I could not stop myself from remembering John shoving me away from him so hard that I hit a stud in the unfinished wall of my attic studio—he was six feet, and powerful, a farm boy from Alberta—my arms were bruised for weeks, the next day I could hardly move my back was so sore. He was sobbing when he did it. Maybe I was too, I can’t remember. The strange thing was that although I knew I was hurt, at the moment of it happening, I felt nothing. I sometimes think of that—how I felt nothing. And other memories from my childhood—I took a deep breath through my nose and mentally shoved it all back into darkness.
“He had six children,” Dan was saying. He laughed, but the sound was flat and unamused, painful to hear. “Katie and Joy”—these were John’s two daughters with Willie—”and another four. He went to Ontario to teach—afterward. First, he smashed my windshield and tried to kick in my front door. Then he married again and went to Halifax—I bet she looks like Willie.” For an instant Willie hovered between us, the gentleness she had, the way she would look at you with a kind of fond tenderness, like a mother at her grown-up child.
“Probably,” I said, my voice as neutral as his. Then that sureness went out of his face as suddenly as it had last night, and I braced myself for some unbearable revelation, or an accusation.
“She’s been haunting me,” he said softly.
“What? You mean … actual apparitions?”
He went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “I think about her all the time. It’s almost as bad as when she first died.”
“So that’s why you came last night.”
“I told you it was an impulse.”
“So why are we here, having this conversation?” I asked.
“Joy and Kate—they came to see me. Not very long ago.” This stopped me, for an instant I couldn’t speak, I hadn’t thought of them in years.
“They came—why?” I asked, and had to clear my throat.
“They just wanted to know—what happened, I think.” He said this as if he were talking about the neighbours or somebody he’d heard of once. I half expected him to yawn. It was bizarre.
“What did you tell them?”
“What could I tell them?” He’d been slouching in his chair and now he straightened, swivelled toward me, cupping his coffee mug in his palms, and staring into it instead of at me. “We fell in love. We left together. Their mother wouldn’t leave without them, so they came, too. I knew it wasn’t what they wanted to hear.”
I made an “Mmmm” sound. But in the silence that followed another memory came welling up and I was immersed again in the ambience of the four of us in that house, John and Willie’s, on a black and freezing winter night, snowbanks piled up around the walls and driveway and down each side of the town’s streets, a high wind pelting the house with snow, whining around the windows and roof, giving all four of us an excuse for Dan and me to stay the night. Upstairs their two little girls asleep, and us in the living room, Willie woozy from wine, and the rest of us mellowed out, as we used to say, on pot. And that something drifting through the air. I remembered it still, I felt it; it came to me so clearly that the skin on my thighs prickled, and I shivered and pulled myself back to the shiny tabletop, the waitresses murmuring together across the room.
“After she died, their grief—John’s sister came and got them, took them back to him. I went off the deep end there, for a while. No doubt you heard,” he added, glancing at me. I nodded. “Then I couldn’t get her out of my mind—I can’t—I nearly started drinking again, I—” He stopped abruptly, as if shutting down that line of thought, and I had the urge to touch his hand in commiseration but resisted, as much because he had left me once, long ago, as because I knew he would pull away from my touch. I managed to keep my voice soft.
“How long has this been going on?”
“Months—I don’t know. The girls—they’re women now—really threw me.” After a moment he said, “She was such a good person. She shouldn’t have had such a terrible death.”
“It doesn’t help to sanctify her,” I told him, resorting to briskness. There it was again, as if all these years hadn’t passed at all. She was just pretty, she was just—sweet, while I—“She was pretty ordinary, actually,” I said, testing him. I suddenly wondered if I’d said that before, when all of it was happening. Knowing me, probably.
“She wasn’t ordinary,” he said, although mildly, as if he couldn’t be bothered to argue. “Or if she was, it was in a way that had nothing to do with why I loved her.”
For an instant after Dan and Willie had left, I’d been stung, my pride was hurt, but then, I thought how I had John, that John was mine now, and I saw that what had started out as a game, a distraction from that boring little city full of boring, provincial people, had turned into something else: it had turned into my deepest desire. I remembered that then I did not regret this in the least, and for the first time in a long time I knew I would cry if I let go, even a little.
“All these years have passed, nearly thirty years,” I said. I didn’t know what it was I wanted to say, I was struggling with something that refused to form itself into a question I could ask, or something I could say, like, maybe, I suffered too, you don’t know how bad it was. “Hard to believe we once loved each other,” I said finally, and I looked at him, afraid of what he might say, and yearning for his agreement in a naked way that shamed and puzzled me.
“We didn’t love each other!” He sounded more surprised than angry. “We were just both so screwed up. We clung to each other like limpets cling to rocks. That’s not love.” I took my cigarettes and lighter out of my bag and, fumbling a little, lit up. I wanted to remind him of how good we’d been in bed, but I could see that he’d deny that too, and I knew that, even now, I’d do anything to avoid hearing that denial. I smiled carefully at him through my cigarette smoke.
“You’re destroying my most cherished memories,” I said. He spoke over my voice, abruptly, as if he could no longer hold it back.
“We killed her.”
I wasn’t sure, for an instant, that I’d heard him right. But then I knew I had, and I was suddenly very tired. So tired I could have put my head down on the table and gone to sleep.
“No,” I said, as if I’d never, not once, thought of this myself. “Her decision to kill herself was hers alone.”
I’d always wanted to paint her, nude, of course: she had a long-legged graceful body, her skin was pale and of the finest grain—but John would never allow such a thing. And I had no interest in doing the Madonna-with-children that he wanted, so I never painted her, or even drew her, not once. I would have questioned that beauty, I would have searched out the darkness in her—but Dan went on as if he hadn’t heard my denial.
“John because he wouldn’t leave her alone after she was gone, me because … I took her away, I put her in a position she wasn’t strong enough to cope with, you because—”
“Because why.”
“You started the whole thing.” There was no accusation in Dan’s voice, just a heaviness, as if he’d always known this and knew that I knew it, too. That we all did. That there was no point in histrionics any more, not even from me. “Willie and I would never have gotten together, she would never have—if you hadn’t decided you wanted to sleep with her husband.”
I wondered what would happen if I stood up and left. I imagined myself at home, pouring a stiff Scotch, turning on the television, letting Rosie, my cat, curl up on my lap. Nothing, I supposed. Nothing at all, but then I would never be finished with it, either.
“If it makes you feel any better, the moment you two left John dropped me,” I said. “He never stopped loving his wife or wanting his marriage or his children. Maybe he was the only one who took it all in the right spirit.” I paused, feeling heat ri
sing in my face. “It was only supposed to be a diversion—” Then I said, “You were part of it too.” I was becoming angry. “Nobody forced you. Or Willie.”
Dan swung his head to gaze out the big plate-glass window through the ferns and various other potted plants, to the street where it had begun to rain harder. He shrugged, a barely perceptible acknowledgement of what I’d just said.
‘And then we fell in love,” he said and laughed briefly, quietly. “Joy seemed stunned and hurt and baffled all at once. Such a pale, shapeless little person she grew up to be. And Kate—” He shook his head. “Such hate, such rage. Maybe I deserve it.” Funny how I hadn’t thought of them, as if what happened to them, or how they felt about what had happened, belonged to a different universe than the one the four of us inhabited.
“Stop it,” I said. “You can’t change anything.” Everything was coming back to me, all of it, and I hated him for finding me, hated myself for needing this meeting.
“You were ruthless,” he said, “in those days. I always supposed it was that upbringing you had.”
“I wanted what I wanted,” I admitted, smiling faintly at him, as if his attacking me were nothing. I’d been cured of my ruthlessness, or at least I’d learned to look both ways, to consider, before I went after something.
“And you got off scot-free,” he told me. “You’re the only one of us who did.” Now I had to turn my head away from him, as if I were just checking out the window to see if it was still raining or not. I’d stumbled after John, pulling at his clothes, falling as he jerked away from me; Dan hadn’t seen me on my knees weeping when John was gone.
Years later, when I had a show in Halifax, I’d found John’s address and written to him to say I needed to talk to him. I’d thought it best to prepare him, but he wrote back only, Stay away from me! I got up the courage on my next to last day there to phone him. I said, John, talk to me, I’m afraid, I can’t go on, I have to tell you—and he hung up on me. My palms against my coffee mug were damp, as if the rain outside were spreading and all of us, sooner or later, would drown in it.
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