Real Life

by Sharon Butala

  “I have to feed her,” Stephanie says, in that same quiet, emotionless voice, and stands. Louisa hands her the baby, she’s gotten a grip on herself again, and Stephanie goes back to her place, sits, and begins to unbutton her neat cotton blouse so the baby can nurse.

  Louisa says carefully, “Everything okay here?” Stephanie’s fingers on the blouse buttons give a little jerk.

  She says quickly, “Sure, fine, everything’s fine.”

  “Don’t try to kid me, Steph,” Louisa says. “I can see how things are.” Stephanie freezes, looks at Louisa with a terrorstricken expression. “He’s gone for the day, Stephanie,” she reminds her. “He can’t hear this—”

  “Sometimes he comes back.” This bursts out of Stephanie in a high, breathless voice, while her eyes flit to the door and back to fix themselves on Louisa.

  “If you want,” Louisa says, keeping her voice as calm as she can manage, “you can come with me right now. Just bundle up that baby and we’ll go. He’ll never know where you went.”

  Now colour floods Stephanie’s pale cheeks, she’s breathing quickly, and she puts the baby up against her shoulder, hugging her, as if the child will be a shield between her and Louisa.

  “I can’t just—I can’t—”

  “Of course you can,” Louisa says. She’s found the right tone now, self-assured, collected, so firm as to brook no disagreement. “You don’t have to live like this. He’s got no right—”

  “He’s my husband,” Stephanie whispers. She still hasn’t taken her eyes away from Louisa’s face. Louisa wants to say what she thinks of Rory, but holds it back, and just shakes her head slowly, no, as if Stephanie is, quite simply, wrong.

  “Get your coat and a warm blanket for Tara and we’ll go. Go on, now.” Stephanie still stares at her, clutching her baby, but Louisa sees in the way Stephanie’s composure is going that she can win this. “Hurry, now,” she adds in a friendly way, almost conversationally. “Be quick about it.”

  The girl stands clumsily, noisily, lowering her baby to the crook of her arm—it’s then that Louisa sees the dark bruises on her neck—and whispers, “You better go, Louisa.”

  Louisa stands, too, careful to move slowly. “Give me Tara. You run and get some diapers.” She reaches for the baby. “You hurry, now,” she says again.

  There’s a long moment when they stare at each other mutely, Stephanie’s eyes large and glittering with something that might be the awakening of hope, Louisa trying to keep her gaze steady and confident. Then, her eyes still locked to Louisa’s, Stephanie hands her the baby.

  As they go out of the house and get in the truck it’s snowing; judging by the thin drifts of snow on the hood and windshield, it must have started when Louisa went into the Degler house. She backs around and drives away, out of the yard, and at the grid, points the truck north. It occurs to Louisa that they’re leaving tracks. Never mind, by the time Rory gets back from the sale, they’ll be covered up or they’ll have blown away.

  They ‘re not two miles north of the Deglers’ farm when they meet a pickup driving south fast, but the snowfall is thicker now, and with it billowing up as the vehicles meet and pass, Louisa can’t tell who the driver is. Stephanie has her face buried in her baby’s blanket, Louisa doesn’t know if crying or praying, or what. She steps on the gas, but visibility is too poor, so she drops her speed back to an even eighty klicks.

  “I heard there’s a safe house over in Victory. Bars, locks, the Mounties guard it.” Louisa doesn’t know if the part about the Mounties is true, but she doesn’t care. “You’ll be safe there,” she adds. Stephanie puts a free hand up to her face, then puts it down again. She hasn’t spoken since she got into the truck.

  Suddenly, it seems out of nowhere, Louisa sees a half-ton has pulled out of the curtain of falling snow and is riding their bumper. She’s about to slow and pull over so it can pass, when the driver pulls out, roars past them, then, braking, slides his truck in front of them at an angle, cutting them off. Louisa brakes hard. Her truck fishtails on the frozen gravel, bouncing over the ruts, and jerks to a halt a foot from the half-ton’s side.

  Beside her, Stephanie has begun to gulp air, letting out short screams with each breath, like a woman in labour. She’s clutching the baby so tight that the child starts to shriek too. The driver’s door of the half-ton opens and Rory Degler gets out, facing them, his left hand setting something along the top of the seat so they can see it through the back window. It’s a rifle. He passes Louisa, squeezes between her hood and his truck’s side, still facing them, goes to Stephanie’s side, and opens her door.

  Stephanie has stopped screaming, but she’s shaking so hard that as she tries to step down to the road he has to grab her jacket to keep her from falling. He isn’t even looking at her; he’s looking at Louisa with his wide, light blue eyes. She stares back, fascinated; she can’t look away; she can’t tell what she feels, although she doesn’t think it’s fear—it’s something else; it’s as if in his gaze she’s encountering something fascinating, something she’s never met before.

  Behind him, Stephanie has opened the door of her husband’s truck, slides the screaming baby in on the seat, stumbling twice, tries to get in, succeeds finally, and pulls the door shut. Louisa sees this out of the corner of her eye, because she can’t take her eyes from Rory’s. He stares into Louisa’s for another long minute: there is some moving darkness in his pale eyes, some blackness that she can see, and whatever it is it pulls at her insides, it both scares her and—

  Abruptly, without closing her passenger door, he turns and walks away. He gets back into the driver’s seat, slams the door, guns the motor, does a series of rapid partial turns on the narrow road until his truck is facing back south, steps on the gas, his tires spewing gravel that hits Louisa’s truck with a series of angry thuds that make her flinch, and vanishes behind her into the wall of falling snow.

  Louisa sits in the truck, her hands flat on her thighs, staring through the windshield as the snow piles up on the wipers. She finds herself shaking, but she ignores this. Her mind is racing: she’ll go to the Mountie, swear Degler threatened to shoot her—but Stephanie will lie for him, what else can she do? Now, she’ll go to Stephanie’s parents—A huge anger is rising in her, her chest swells with rage, and for a long moment she can’t breathe.

  I will kill him myself, she thinks. Shocked, she lifts her hands abruptly from her thighs, holding them in mid-air for an instant, and then sets them on the icy steering wheel.

  The passenger door is still open and a thin drift of snow is settling on the seat. She slides over, brushes the snow out, and pulls the door shut, then moves back into the driver’s seat and sits there, not moving. Her rage, her astonishment, her determination—even her pity—have left her, and she is no longer trembling. It is as if for the first time in her life she’s felt the force of gravity. It has entered her through her pores, it sits like a steady rock inside her, lending her a new weightiness, a new, grave sobriety.

  Her mind sweeps across the peaceful, snow-covered prairie to the deserted-looking farm and ranch houses, to the cattle and horses standing in corrals, snow building up on their backs and manes, to the homely village miles down the road full of people she’s known all her life, going about their business, as if—as if they’ve never seen, never even guessed at the existence of what she just saw in Rory Degler’s eyes.

  Postmodernism

  Today Lawrence leaves for Africa. I know he is leaving and where he is going because he told me when we had drinks together the other night in the mall near his parents’ apartment in a senior citizens’ high-rise. He had not seen his parents in a very long time and I think he does not expect to see them again in this life. He has come to say goodbye. It is too bad because they are very old and he is their only child.

  Lawrence and I have been divorced for fifteen years, but even though I’ve been married to someone else for most of that time, and have children with him, I still love Lawrence.

  I do
n’t think he loves me. It is worse than that: he loves no one. “I no longer have relationships with women,” he tells me. In that particular wording I do not read homosexuality; he is telling me he has become celibate.

  I am a writer and I have been accused of merely writing autobiography in my stories, as if that were somehow easier to do than making everything up. Before I went to meet Lawrence, agitated as I was, it crossed my mind that I would find some way of writing about seeing him after so many years—the things we say to each other, what has become of us—some peripheral telling of lies maybe, or an extension of fact that will take the encounter from the banal to the cosmic, that will find a universal chord, because that is what good writers do, the ones who know there is no difference among autobiography, biography, fiction or non-fiction, between stories and real life.

  Even after so many years, when we met we didn’t touch, although we moved close to each other as if we thought we should or wanted to. Or maybe it was only the normal social urge to shake hands or hug or brush cheeks. But we didn’t, both speaking at once about going inside the bar or going somewhere else or being sorry to be late or I’m always early.

  Lawrence has been in an ashram in New Mexico, near Los Alamos, for the last fifteen years, and I was surprised at how much he drank, no polite nursing a light beer, but three, maybe four whiskies and more, that he smoked the entire time we were together. “I didn’t think they allowed that in an ashram,” I said to him, trying to be wry, amused by his life choices, sort of removed from him, as if he was someone I barely knew, instead of the person whose physical presence in my life is inconsequential because, although I tried for ten years to erase him from my memory, he had become, when I wasn’t looking, a part of my very essence, of the inescapable texture of my soul. Such is his presence in my life that though Lawrence and I have no children, I am not surprised to find that my two with my second husband look a little like Lawrence. At least I see Lawrence in them every day. For obvious reasons I’ve never told anybody this.

  “They don’t,” he said, and looked at his cigarette in something of the way I must have been looking at him, as if it were an independent creature that had lit itself and sprung into his fingers, he couldn’t quite think how, but accepted the fact with resignation, just another manifestation of Buddha. “I don’t smoke or drink when I’m there.” We were silent, remembering the long-ago nights drinking in the bar with friends, the pub we said then, when we were students. I’ve sometimes thought Lawrence had a drinking problem, he certainly drank a lot when we were young, before drugs came along. I drink more now, though, than I ever did then, and as for drugs, I hated them. By the time they were part of our lives I was getting tired. I wanted only to go home and sleep, or to go for a solitary walk down a country lane.

  I had set myself, before our meeting, to be removed from him, cool, I had shut off my heart—don’t laugh—anyone who has suffered, really suffered, can do this. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not. But I knew I had to protect myself from him because I knew I still loved him, that I will go to my grave loving him more, not less, every year. It is no fault of mine.

  Now Lawrence is a holy man and I, a writer, am learning the niceties of moderate fame, the dimensions and intricacies of it, the protocol, you might say. I want to ask him about holiness, how it feels, the spiritual life; I want him to take out his heart, open it, and lay it out on the table so I can see the wheels and cogs, the turning of it. I imagine the parts as dull brass, worn, but with glints of gold moving against a rosy background. I can see us sitting there, bent over it as it lies open on the brown bar table. We stare at it in silence, Lawrence adjusting the glasses he now wears, me perhaps surreptitiously taking out the small pad and stubby pencil I always carry, scribbling a note in the shorthand I have invented that nobody else can read.

  But I thought it was better to go for particulars.

  “Why don’t you have relationships with women?” I asked him.

  It was gloomy in the bar, the way that bars are deliberately badly lit so that customers will let down their guards, feel an intimacy with each other, with the waitress and the bartender, feel for a while safe, so that they won’t want to leave. It was a small place and there were only a few people scattered in twos and threes at the other tables. I moved closer to Lawrence so we could talk without being overheard. In this small city, my hometown, strangers know me.

  “Because I’m too destructive with them,” Lawrence replied, as if it cost him little to say this, only a hesitation giving him away. I wanted to ask him, Do you still love me? but I didn’t. I knew he would say he does, and I knew, too, that this would be true, but in such a way as to be of no use to me. That is one thing I have learned in the fifteen years without him.

  Lawrence rarely looked at me, while I leaned close to him and didn’t take my eyes off him. He told me he was being sent by his “community” to Somalia to work with the hungry. It occurred to me that Los Alamos would be the perfect place for the Second Coming of Christ. I said this.

  “An apparition out of the desert in silver boots,” I suggested.

  “With bright blue eyes,” Lawrence added. “Not milky brown ones.”

  “A white chiffon scarf around his neck, blowing in the wind from the atomic blast,” I offered.

  “You’re thinking of Wayne Newton,” he said.

  “No, Sam Shepard in The Right Stuff.”

  I didn’t like what was happening. I hated talking to him as if he were just an old friend, I hated the way he wouldn’t say the things I’d waited fifteen years to hear, but I knew I would hate it more if he said them. I began to think the meeting was a mistake for both of us, although how could it be?

  Thinking about it afterwards, or rather, trying to write about it, I want the Lawrence character to say to the woman, “Are you happy?” He didn’t though, and I realize now that the question comes from movies or second-rate novels. It is perhaps the one question real people would never ask each other. It is too intimate, too hard to answer, too much to ask of anyone. In fact, it occurs to me it is a silly question, as if happiness were a steady state one might finally rest in through judicious life choices.

  Looking at Lawrence, I can see that fifteen years in an ashram, learning to be holy, making holy choices, have not made him happy. As for me, marrying again and having children and a career, although I am not unhappy, have made me lose track of what happiness is. Of what I once thought it was, when I was young and thought I knew with clarity what it is and, of course, that it was achievable. It seems so strange to me now that I didn’t notice then that no one older than me was happy, that no matter how others behaved, when they looked away their eyes grew dark.

  When Lawrence phoned and asked me to come out and have a drink with him, I didn’t ask him why. Another silly question that a screenwriter or playwright, imagining this occasion, might put into the mouth of a character. But not asking him why, believing I knew why, didn’t mean that I knew what to expect. My heart had behaved erratically from the moment I’d heard his voice. I fluctuated from seconds of a rage so deep I had frightened myself to an aching desire that was worse. Having settled on distancing myself, when I saw the sadness in the set of his face, I was glad that I didn’t care that he isn’t happy.

  When I stood waiting for him outside the bar and saw him come around the corner, my first thought was of how he was smaller than I remembered in every visible way, thinner and shorter, altogether diminished physically. I didn’t mind that he was smaller, it was only that I half expected it in the way the farmhouse kitchen was smaller than I remembered and the convent full of killer nuns where I had the misfortune to begin school. But when I said to him that he was thin and asked, “Are you well?”—now that is a reasonable question, authors—he said that he runs five miles a day and works out, that he has never been so fit. And there was a flicker of something in his eyes beyond pride; I suspect it was delight.

  I leaned closer, trying to see him clearly in the bad light and
shadows.

  “Do you remember the time we went to Banff and Lake Louise for that weekend without telling anybody?” he asked.

  “In a borrowed car,” I said, looking wryly off toward the glass wall where, in a better light, people were walking by. “And you broke your arm—”

  “And it blizzarded for three days and we couldn’t leave—”

  “And Gerry never forgave us for not getting his car back for a week—”

  But what I remembered was that thirty years ago there was no place more beautiful than Lake Louise buried in snow, the lodge half closed, nobody around. I remember especially that the only sound had been water trickling at the edge of the lake where for some reason it hadn’t frozen over. And Banff not yet a tacky, tourist-ridden, expensive fake, but a real town where people went quietly about their lives. But it clings to me, over all these years, the distant crystalline sound of running water in the frozen, snowy wilderness.

  “The last time I was at Lake Louise you couldn’t see that famous view for people. This is not hyperbole,” I said, but I could see he wasn’t listening. I found I didn’t want to talk about Banff. All right, I said, to all the bad authors of the world. All right.

  “Why did you want to meet me?” I knew I sounded irritable. I was surprised at the quickness of his reply, as if he’d asked himself that question and had memorized the answer.

  “I missed you,” he said. “You were an important part of my life and I missed you.” I found I didn’t know what that meant. Was it an oblique way of saying he loves me? Or was it a way of saying he doesn’t love me, never did? Or was he thinking he had to tie up all the loose ends because he would never be back again, that he would stay the rest of his life in Africa, that soldiers would shoot him, or he would contract a disease, that he would die there?