Dan and I were leaning across the restaurant table so that our heads were close together, each of us looking, not at each other, but at our reflections in its glossy plastic finish.
John and I had lain in each other’s arms on the sofa, watching Willie mount the stairs with Dan as if she were drifting in a dream, as if none of what was happening were real. I suppose Dan believed he could make her real, make all of it real. I remember I’d closed John’s eyes with my lips—in the lamplight and the night their blue-grey had deepened, it frightened me—I didn’t dare let him watch his wife go up the stairs with another man. And I wanted him to remember that now he had me.
And what else had I wanted? Besides John? I wasn’t sure I could remember. To shed my history, I suppose. To defy it, to pull myself free into some world where people didn’t enslave you and call it love or duty or necessity, where beauty and even joy were possible.
While we’d been talking the lunch crowd had started to come into the café. If we didn’t order lunch ourselves, we’d probably have to leave as more people gathered to wait for tables. I sat back then, knowing now I would never see Dan again.
“Who would ever have thought it would end this way,” I murmured.
“What way has it ended?” Dan asked. “It hasn’t ended.”
The waitress arrived then and pointedly put our bill down on the table, neatly halfway between us. Dan reached into his pocket and threw a couple of coins onto the table. He pushed away the chair beside him with his foot, rose, and began to walk away. I followed, the crowd at the door moving aside to let us through.
Outside on the sidewalk we stood facing each other in the light patter of rain. The lunch-hour crowd parted and went around us, tilting their umbrellas away.
“I’m thinking of marrying again,” he said. “A young woman—she thinks I’m a god,” and he had the grace to laugh, although in a faintly sardonic way. “I don’t want to be alone any more.” He said this quietly, so I barely heard it. This was finally the reason he’d wanted to talk to me. For a moment, I couldn’t speak.
“There is not much demand for old women,” I said, my voice harsh.
The light at the end of the block changed and cars hissed by on the wet pavement, creating a cold wind that made Dan hunch and me pull up my collar. A woman hurried by, a spoke of her umbrella poking my head as she passed. She kept going.
“I wonder, is everyone’s life like this?” Dan asked.
We looked at each other then, into each other’s eyes, deeply, and in his, or in that moment, I saw what I had always known and denied. That this was real, had always been real, that long ago, the four of us, stranded in that snowy little city far from the capitals of the world, by doing what we did, met, or made, a fate that would keep us firmly tied to the earth until the gods took pity on us, and finally let us go.
Night Class
The memo from her department head asking her to teach the fall semester in one of the university’s satellite programs lay on her desk. If she agreed, besides her regular teaching load, she’d be driving once a week to the monastery an hour from the city to fill in for Dr. Chomska, who’d had a heart attack. She saw the request at once as a chance to earn extra money and, Aaron uppermost in her mind, dismissed all her misgivings as quickly as they presented themselves: asking her mother to babysit yet again, the condition of her car, Chomska’s course that she’d have to teach. She hesitated an instant, but then she was punching numbers on the phone and the department head’s assistant was saying “Dr. Russell’s office.”
When she set down the phone, Christine found she was trembling: if it was with joy that she saw her fund for Aaron taking an unexpected leap, she was also, suddenly, picturing herself in the middle of the night stuck in a snowbank on a deserted country road. She might have changed her mind even then, but the phone rang, startling her out of her train of thought.
“Christine?”
“Yes,” she said crisply, as if she were talking to a colleague or a workman she was thinking of hiring, instead of her husband who, as she told everyone, had abandoned his family and run off to Montreal as soon as the going got tough. She never said it, though, without experiencing a stab of guilt.
“I’m thinking about you and the kids.” She imagined him seated at his desk in some chilly, grimly neat office, still wearing his bulky tweed overcoat, his mouth glum, his dark eyes magnified behind his thick glasses.
“Oh?” she said, mustering coldness, although far behind her eyes heat was rising that meant she might cry.
“Talk to me, Christine.” She began to shove papers around on her desk.
“Things are fine,” she told him. “Meagan has a cold, Mother is staying with her until she’s better. Aaron …” She hesitated.
“Aaron is as usual?”
Involuntarily she placed her fingertips on her chest, over her heart. She said, “Yes, the same.” He started to speak, but she spoke over his voice, hurried, her own strained and too high-pitched. “I found—there’s a new program—it’s there, in Montreal—”
“Public or private?”
“Private, but really—”
He made an exasperated sound. “It’s hopeless, Christine.”
She pulled the phone away from her ear, almost dropped it into its cradle, but at the last instant held back. “I’m determined to try this, Graeme.” She paused. “Last hope,” she said, she could give him this much, and made a sound meant to be a laugh. “I’m teaching a night class to help pay for it. I’m writing to ask for government funding; I’m going to write to that big telethon. I’m not going to give up until—”
“Until what?” Graeme asked. “Until your mother’s dead from the stress? Until Meagan is destroyed? Until there’s no one left but you and Aaron, and not even Aaron because he doesn’t know where the hell he is—”
She dropped the phone into its cradle and stood, blinking, her hands pressed against the heat in her cheeks. Immediately the phone rang again and she picked it up without quite realizing she had.
“I’m sorry,” Graeme said.
“There’s nothing left to say. We’ve said everything.”
“I’m waiting for you to get it, Chris,” he said quietly. “It isn’t that I don’t love you. You know I only went this far away because this was the only job I could get.”
“Two years,” she said.
“Not quite eighteen months,” he answered her, and laughed softly, whether at her, their situation, or something she didn’t know about, she couldn’t tell. He must have a woman, she thought. Of course he has a woman. There was another long silence, but it seemed to her it buzzed with all the arguments, all the things each of them had said over and over again, and her palm grew damp against the plastic of the phone.
“I will come back,” he said then. “If …”
“If I give my child away, if I hand him over to some institution, just pretend he never happened.”
“More or less,” Graeme said. His voice was flat, and she noted defiantly that he no longer bothered to qualify this or argue with her. “I can’t wait forever,” he said. Another silence, while she pressed her hand against the grimace she could feel beginning to distend her mouth.
“I have to go now, I’m due in class. I’m sending money,” he said and hung up the phone so quietly that she was for a second not sure he had.
The road to the monastery was a narrow secondary highway that wound between grass-covered, yellow hills and past copses of trees radiant in their fall golds and oranges. It was early evening and the shadows were long, the golden light of late day turning the dull countryside into a strange, unearthly kingdom. She hadn’t done any country driving in a long time, and she found herself slowing so that she could enjoy the landscape which she found unexpectedly lovely. Maybe in the coming summer she could find a way to take the children to a lake for a week or two. They were growing up without ever seeing nature, she thought, and it was as if a whole new dimension of life entered her thinking for the first time
in a long time, and she wondered if this meant that finally she was getting over Graeme.
For a moment, she even forgot the long winter ahead of her of travelling by herself down this road. In this gentle beauty it was hard to worry about winter. And there was Chomska’s course that she’d agreed to teach: Introduction to Postmodernist Literary Theory. A ton of work, texts to read she’d so far mostly managed to avoid, she’d found them so objectionable. She who had been raised on books, the pure, sumptuous world they opened for her, the passion. “It’s this course or nothing,” her department head had told her in his fake-jolly manner, when she’d timidly suggested they change it to one she was used to teaching. As if he didn’t know that despite her relative youth—she was twenty years younger than Chomska—she was the last old-fashioned humanist in the English department.
At its outskirts she turned down a gravel road that skirted the town. Far ahead of her a small forest stood, orange and gold against the sea of dusky summerfallow surrounding it. The tall white spire of a church she’d been told to look for rose above the trees on the far side. Her car’s small tires crunched and slid, and she slowed, not used to driving on gravel.
The monastery itself was much larger than she’d imagined, built of faded red brick, crumbling and patched-looking, with obvious newer additions on one end. The park surrounding it was bigger, too, than she’d thought when she’d seen it from a mile or so away, and through the trees to one side she could make out a neat row of smaller frame buildings. Her nervousness rising, she parked, pulled her briefcase out of the back seat, and crossed the parking lot to the wooden double doors.
A monk stood just inside them, evidently waiting for her. He held back the heavy door for her and introduced himself as the abbot.
“It’s good you arrived a little early,” he said. “I always show the new faculty around the first evening, answer questions, that sort of thing.” He was perhaps sixty, a little stout in his worn black cassock, going bald, and so close-shaven that his face shone with a pink light.
“Thank you …” She couldn’t think how to address him and bowed her head to hide her confusion.
“Call me Dominique,” he told her, “or Father Dominique.”
He led her down long corridors with either polished and echoing wooden floors or worn vinyl tiles, opening doors as he went to show her classrooms, the cavernous, gleaming-clean kitchen, and the stark guest rooms.
“Sometimes faculty uses them when a winter storm blows in unexpectedly,” he told her. They turned this way and that, climbed stairs and descended others, until she was lost. At one point he’d gestured toward a narrower hall to their left, it seemed to her less brightly lit than the others, and said that it led to the monks’ residence and that it was, of course, offlimits to everyone else. Then he hurried her on.
“This is our library,” he said, and stood back to allow her to cross the threshold into a long, high-ceilinged room full of rows of book-laden shelves. A half-dozen stern-looking old men in plain, dark-wood frames frowned down on the few students, all young and male, lost in study at the oak tables which ran in a long column down the room’s centre. She smiled at the abbot, nodding politely, although the pictures offended her and the smell in the room of old floor wax or of oiled wood was distasteful.
“I’ll show you our chapel and then you’ll have had the inside tour. We run a full-scale farm here too, and we have an orchard and a very large vegetable garden, plus cows and laying hens.” He turned to her now, and smiled down at her in a friendly, easy way that suddenly, frighteningly, made her want to nestle her head against his plump chest. “We’re pretty much self-sufficient here.”
“No women,” she pointed out before she could stop herself. She hoped she’d said it in a joking tone, but she could hear her voice hanging in the air, forlorn, like a minor note on a piano.
“No, no women,” he agreed amiably. “But many women come here for spiritual retreats or to attend programs. We aren’t like those monks on Athos who don’t even allow females on the premises.”
The chapel was even larger than the library, and in contrast, very modern, with sleek pews of polished blond wood, white walls, and a stylized, terra-cotta crucified Christ on the altar. It was empty, but in their moment’s halt so she could look around, Christine became aware of a sound invading the chapel’s intense quiet, a deep-voiced, rhythmic murmur. The abbot was glancing about as if to check if anything was out of place or needed fixing. Beside him, Christine stood motionless, listening.
Male voices were filtering through the unbroken wall behind the altar, and though the sound was muffled, rising and falling, sometimes fading out to return on a louder note, it gradually came to her that it was chanting.
“It is our monks at evening prayer,” the abbot murmured, oddly formal now.
She found herself advancing a few steps toward the sound, her head cocked. It’s like the beating of a human heart, she thought, full of wonder, it’s as if it is my own heart beating, and heat rose into her cheeks, she felt a quivering start in her abdomen and solar plexus and wondered, Am I ill? What is this?
Father Dominique turned briskly to her.
“I’m sure you want to do a little preparation before your class arrives.” Obediently, Christine followed the purposeful swish of his skirts out of the chapel.
Night had fallen when she began her solitary drive back to the city. The road was deserted; no other headlights disturbed the darkness and no stars were visible; only the rare yardlight on a farm miles back from the road lit a small orange triangle in the sea of black. Christine was exhausted, leaning back in her seat as she drove, her head against the cushioned backrest. The class had gone well, she thought, although only one of her twelve students was a man—strangely, much older than the others, older even than her by at least fifteen years—and extra attentive, not in a studently way, she thought, but rather as if he found her an interesting phenomenon that would bear watching. She smiled nervously in the darkness as she thought of him and the way he held his mouth, sympathetically she found, and for no reason she could pinpoint, she was assailed by the penetrating sadness that nowadays seemed to be always present beneath whatever lightheartedness she might briefly find. Or had it always been this way? Surely in childhood she’d often been purely happy? But she wasn’t sure.
Her mind circled around and came back, as it always did, to seven-year-old Aaron. Was he happy? she wondered. He did something that might be called play: he walked in circles, he rocked until she stopped him, he banged his head sometimes, although that behaviour was almost eradicated. He would sometimes sit on her knee while she read a story to Meagan, but then he would hum tunelessly, more a drone really, and usually it would escalate to that high, purposeless, meaningless scream of his, and nothing she said or did would stop it. She thought of his tense little body perched restlessly on her lap. Never an instant of relaxation until he fell asleep, never anything that might be called cuddling. Tears sprang to her eyes, but she refused them relentlessly. Crying had not so far cured him; she doubted it would do so now and sat forward in the seat, grasped the steering wheel more firmly, and accelerated the sooner to escape this darkness through which she drove.
When she pulled up in front of her house she’d already seen that all the lights downstairs were on, although it was nearly eleven. She stopped with a jerk, grabbed her briefcase, and rushed up the sidewalk and into the house. Her mother was waiting in the hall, her face white, her arms in their unravelling green wool sweater hugging herself tightly.
“It’s okay, Christine, it’s okay now,” her mother said before she could ask. “He’s back in bed. He’s asleep.”
For a long second Christine could only stare, her heart was in her throat, choking off her voice. She slumped against the wall, her briefcase falling to the floor.
“What happened?”
Her mother was smaller even than Christine and thinner, too, a tiny woman, really, gazing up at her out of large, steady brown eyes, whose colour
tonight had darkened to black.
“I left his door unlocked when I put him to bed. Meagan called me and I went to her—I forgot the door wasn’t locked—and …”
“I forgot to lock the front door when I went out?” Christine asked and, without waiting for an answer, moaned, “How could I be so stupid?” Her mother shrugged, “Or I did. I think it was me.” Christine straightened, began to shrug out of her coat.
“Was he gone long? Where was he? Who found him?”
“About forty minutes. The police.” Her mother was helping her take off her coat, moving aside the briefcase. “He was running down the centre of Fourteenth, shrieking and flapping his arms, the way he does. Perfectly happy to go with the policeman.”
“God,” Christine said.
“Indeed.” This was tart. “I’m thinking it’s time you—”
“Mother”—a warning. Her mother turned, walked toward the kitchen. “I need a drink, Mom.”
“Go check Meagan, and I’ll mix you one.”
The key to Aaron’s room was, as always, hanging on the doorknob. She turned it softly in the lock and pushed open the door. He lay on his stomach, his face turned toward her, the wedge of light from the hall showing her his long dark eyelashes, his sweetly curved mouth, the mass of curly dark hair. He’d pushed aside his quilt and his pyjamas were twisted on his defenceless little calves.
She came forward, deciding against trying to straighten his pyjamas for fear of waking him, pulled the quilt gently up over him, and touched his curls softly, the familiar anguish welling up in her chest. She pushed it down, blinking, then went softly out, turning the key in the lock, letting it drop to hang on its cord from the handle. She never did this without a mix of satisfaction, that he was safe and would remain so until morning, and of guilt, that she, a mother, was her child’s jailer.
Real Life Page 2