“Meaning what, Stanley?”
“Meaning I don’t want no part of, what you call, a domestic dispute. If you’re going to talk to her by hand I don’t want no part of it. I can’t afford to get mixed up in that kind of thing. Even if my book was to suffer,” he adds weightily.
“For Christ’s sake, Rubacek,” I exclaim, aghast, “are you suggesting I’m going to beat her up? Is that what you’re suggesting?”
For the first time Rubacek turns his shallow, pale eyes on me. “I’m not suggesting diddly squat, perfessor. I’m asking.”
“I don’t strike women, Stanley. You’re talking to a civilized man.”
Claims to civilization don’t appear to cut any ice with Rubacek. “Excuse me for mentioning it, perfessor, but you don’t look real civilized. In fact, you kind of put me in mind of Alley Oop or like that. You got the look of a guy might take a lady for a drag by the hair and so on.”
I lean forward and crook my neck at the rear-view mirror. He’s right. Two piggish inflamed eyes squint out of pouches of flesh, a dirty, raspish stubble makes my jaws heavy and brutal. I barely have time to take in this dark, sinister image when it begins to dissolve in the warm mist of my breath; blotches of vapour spread like a blight and consume my face. I fall back against the seat and say the one thing I suspect will convince him. “My wife’s pregnant, Stanley. I’m not going to start knocking her around when she’s pregnant. Do you think I want to hurt my kid?”
The King Edward Parkade is stacked beside the hotel in four levels. Climbing the stairs to the second of these allows me to experience what exercise in these temperatures can do. Breathing through my mouth makes my teeth ache and fills my lungs with a parching coldness. My heart jolts under my parka. I stop to cough. Too many cigarettes, too fat.
I cling to the railing, collecting my breath. There is frost on the steel and the cold creeps into the fingers of my glove like a stain. The entire stairway is exposed to the wind and is treacherous with ice. A floor below I slipped and damn near broke my neck on a patch of glassy, yellow ice left by a pissing drunk. Now a biting, twisting wind is burning my face and moulding my trousers to my legs.
I pat my parka and hear the comforting jingle of car keys. Already numb with cold I congratulate myself for persuading Rubacek to give me his second set so I can return to the car for fortifying nips of coffee and rum. Without alcohol and caffeine I’d be a goner before noon.
The cold sets me moving again before my heart quiets; it is climb or freeze. A dozen more steps bring me to the second level of the parkade. I peer into a low-roofed cavern stinking of gas, dripped oil, and automobile exhaust where the parked cars wait like livestock in their stalls. As I walk among them panting, looking for a blue Volkswagen with a dented fender, I pat their cold flanks, sweep off bits of snow, rub away frost. Up and down the still ranks I go, swivelling my head from side to side as I search, my feet loud and abrupt under the low roof. Every few minutes cars arrive or depart while I briskly march through clouds of exhaust kindled by the embers of tail-lights, or lit in the sanctifying white blaze of headlights. So prophets once must have moved, wrapped in glorious effulgences.
As I step along I make a note to clean myself up. Benny criticized my unwholesome appearance yesterday and now Rubacek has done the same today. And I must admit that not only was the glimpse I caught of myself in the rear-view mirror unflattering, it was unsettling. Victoria would be most displeased if I were to present myself and plead my case looking like this. She cannot abide slovenliness.
Neither, apparently, can Rubacek. When I woke him this morning I saw that a lot of the junk I had scattered on the floor of my bedroom had been shovelled into a closet, and my books were stacked on my dresser top, a sheet of Kleenex marking my place in each. And he made the bed up very precisely, corners squared, blankets drawn drumskin-taut. I suppose they teach them that in prison.
Somehow I’m not entirely easy with Stanley. I don’t exactly trust him. By that I don’t mean I expect him to steal from me, or offer me violence. No. It’s his attitude I distrust, his dead certainty that what he wants he’ll get. He ought to have been my father’s son. They’d have understood each other.
If Pop had said: “Dress to impress. Dress for success” to Rubacek as he did to me six years ago, Stanley would have had some idea of what he was trying to tell him, would have nodded enthusiastically in agreement with this sibylline message. I just went off to the job interview at the TV station knowing I was all wrong in that godawful suit Pop had bought me. If I’d worn it with confidence I might have had a chance. I might have projected the image of a son of the soil. But all I could think of was how I must look like Andy Devine. That’s a difference between Rubacek and me – the proper mental attitude.
I see it as a curse that I can understand so completely some people, and others not at all. It keeps me off-balance. For instance, why can’t I find Victoria? After all these years I ought to be able to guess what she’ll do, but obviously I can’t.
I have no idea what she’ll decide about the baby. There’s no doubt that her desire for a child is strong, that she’s a woman of warm feelings. But I cannot also deny that Victoria has a strong instinct for self-preservation, a will bent to assure her own happiness. She will withhold herself just short of love if necessary. And I’m not criticizing her, not at all. Weak people are no help to anyone, are they?
At first I thought she had been hard when I went to pieces after we returned from Toronto. I had expected her to follow me, to cajole me, when I walked out of the kitchen and into the spare room she had christened my “study.” She did neither. She let me go.
Maybe she’d decided that I was past helping, that if I could, I needed to save myself. Perhaps she was right, because when I walked through that door some part of me still saw it as a game in which we were both participants. I still depended on her to draw me back out of myself, to force me to continue. I was like a man who can lean far back from the face of the cliff and surrender himself to vertigo because he trusts the rope and the one who anchors him. Victoria didn’t plead with me. She let the rope go.
My “study.” I had never wanted this study she created for me, and had no notion of what I was expected to do in it. Certainly nothing like what I did. But a husband happily lodged in his study was one of those eccentric and implacable notions Victoria brought to our marriage. I suppose I was meant to sit in there and write, or tie flies, or carve duck decoys, or scratch the ears of a springer spaniel – that is, conform to some manly configuration.
Instead, when I finally did enter I slammed the study door behind me, broke the light bulb so I wouldn’t be tempted to switch it on, and fell on to the fold-away cot which had recently transformed the unused “study” into a “guest room.” I stayed in there three days.
I can’t remember what went on in that room, my inability being a consequence of shock treatments. There exists evidence of a kind, if I ever choose to consult it: the yellow sheets of paper I had clenched in my hands when I finally flung open the door and called for Victoria. She saved these to show to the doctors, and when they returned them to her she put them in the old jewellery box where all the documents (birth certificate, university degree, etc.) are kept which mark the milestones of my life. Some people might think this odd. I believe she put them there because she felt I ought to read them, although she never said as much. But by then they were part of a past I wanted to stay past.
Victoria never said much at all. She said that when I called to her I appeared incapable of crossing the threshold of the room. Standing just inside the door of my “study” I made an impulsive gesture of appeal and thrust out my arms, pieces of paper bristling from each fist, and said: “I’ve failed him. I’m afraid. I want a doctor.”
I am climbing again. Three levels are behind me. The fourth, which is unroofed, lies under the dove-grey belly of a lightening sky. I emerge into weak sunlight and strong wind.
There are only five or six cars here on the roof; no
one parks by choice in a place so unsheltered. Victoria’s car is not among those scattered about.
I stand shivering on an asphalt surface striped with bold mustard lines, which are visible because the wind has swept the snow into a dune that rises up and curls over the eastern wall of the parkade. That’s unsafe; at night a child could walk up it and over the edge.
I cross the roof, the tail of my nylon parka snapping at the backs of my knees in the wind. The snow of the dune is packed hard, easily capable of bearing even me. I edge up it, testing my weight as I go, rocking forward heel and toe until there is only air before me. Directly below, the street is still darkened by the shadows of buildings. In February the sun hugs the horizon in the way ancient seafarers kept to the coastline, sailing their ships in sight of land.
I remember Victoria shaving me before we left for the hospital. That is clear in my mind. The cream lay thick and smooth on my cheeks, white as the snow beneath my boots, but warm. She wanted me to be clean. I was in the bath. Victoria sat on the edge of the tub and sliced away the foam, dipped the safety razor in the cooling water, reaped another swath of soap and bristle, rinsed the blade with impatient shakes of her hand that shattered the surface of the water. Her other hand lay on the crown of my head, long, calm fingers steadying me. “It’s all right,” she said again and again. My arms lay heavy and lifeless in the tepid water. The soap on my cheeks was eroded by tears. The heat of her hand was salve.
If she is not here where I had expected her to be it may mean she has gone back to Peters. I’m not giving up. I want some sign from her before all this is over. I back down the drift very carefully, unwilling to turn my back on the broken arc of the city plumed with rising smoke.
11
Is it possible that The Beast has saved my life? God, dropping off with the radio playing and the engine running. How long does it take someone to die of carbon monoxide poisoning? I couldn’t have been asleep too long. I check my watch and find that it is eleven o’clock. It was no later than quarter to the hour when I parked.
I ought to be more careful. No, I have to be more careful when I’m this tired. I roll down my window an inch or two an let in an icy draft as a precaution. The morning sun glaring on the snowbanks burns my eyes, begins to incite a headache.
Was it a Pavlovian response on the part of my unconscious to The Beast’s intro music that triggered me awake? I wouldn’t want to feel that I owed him my life. Still, if it weren’t for that blood-curdling tune I might have been found stretched out cold and blue.
I am sitting in Rubacek’s car, on Anthony Peters’s street. It is a fine old street, lavishly treed and lined with appropriately fine old houses which are within easy walking distance of the university. Professors’ Row.
Directly across the street is Anthony’s house. 918. I got the address from the book in the pay telephone booth. Fifteen minutes ago when I knocked at the door of 918 no one answered and I have decided to wait. His door-knocker is a brass lion head, the sort of thing Victoria would admire. Perhaps she even bought it, a garnish to domestic bliss. We never had the like.
I’m a little uneasy about having commandeered Rubacek’s car. However, it could hardly be considered theft if he gave me a set of keys to it. Or could it? Anyway, I trust he’ll be understanding and not report it stolen. I suspect that ex-convicts have a disinclination to involve themselves with police under any circumstances whatsoever. I devoutly hope so.
My speculations about Rubacek’s probable course of action are interrupted by The Beast. “Good morning one and all this frosty February morn. My name is Tom Rollins and the program is ‘A Piece of Your Mind,’ the topical show that shuns no topic. Today I have the very great pleasure of welcoming to our studios the famous Californian clairvoyant Madame Sosostris.”
I leave the radio on because I hope it will prevent me from falling asleep again. The aimless, enthusiastic chatter continues, Rollins pressing the woman on her claims to have extra-sensory perception, and she assuring him that she does. “Experts” of one kind or another are a staple of Rollins’s show and this one states that by tuning in to the “psychic emanations radiating from someone’s personal possession” she can draw a complete psychological profile of the object’s owner. This gift, she wants everyone to know, makes her an invaluable asset for a company choosing among prospective personnel. She doesn’t have to interview anyone, merely fondle his lighter, or ring, or shoe perhaps. Also, Madame Sosostris credits herself with being a “unique diagnostic tool in the ever ongoing battle for mental health.”
I am tired and I cannot bring my mind to fasten on the gibberish spilling from the radio. I wonder about Victoria’s life in the house across the street, her life with Anthony Peters. Has it changed her?
It was about five years ago, some time after I was released from hospital, that Victoria’s and my life changed, that we began to live differently. Until then Victoria had denied herself everything, scrimping and saving for that trip to Greece we would never take. Then I came apart and she had to bring us through all that.
When the pressure finally lifted, Victoria displayed the elation of a survivor. She decided she was through with sacrifices. We were going to have a baby and we were going to live a little, enjoy ourselves. Greece was forgotten. She bought new clothes and some jewellery, splurged on make-up. She enrolled in night classes, threw herself into her work, joined a film society. She imagined us on the move again.
While Victoria was occupied doing all this, I landed a job teaching at the Community College and learned how to cook. In no time at all I mastered pasta and proceeded to curries. On the strength of my glamorous hobby we began to entertain in the larger apartment we had rented.
Victoria seemed to want to be with people all the time. We saw little of our old friends; she showed a preference for new faces, people she’d met at work or at her night classes. Victoria was excited by them because they saw qualities in her that had lain undiscovered and dormant for years. She was a success again, as she had been in high school. A promotion came at work and then another. She was flying high, working and playing hard. I hosted a Thanksgiving dinner for a dozen, a Hallowe’en costume party, a Grey Cup party, then the Christmas season came. Her friends began to get on my nerves. I asked myself if I was jealous. I couldn’t decide. The only thing I knew was that the amount of smoke and noise these idiots made was appalling.
Victoria’s soaring career prompted her to peer into the dark nooks and crannies of mine.
“Somebody told me Cooper was looking for an administrative assistant,” she said to me one day.
“That’s right.”
“You should apply.”
“Why?”
“There’s room to move up in administration. There’s nowhere to go in teaching.”
“Who wants to move?”
“God, Ed, you’re twice as bright as Cooper.”
“No argument there.”
“Doesn’t it bother you to see a man doing a job you could do better?”
“I couldn’t do it better.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t exude unction the way Cooper does. The balm that heals all wounds.”
“I wish you wouldn’t run away from a challenge.”
“So said Lady Macbeth to her hubby.”
“I can’t stand to see you so aimless.”
“I’m not aimless.”
I didn’t consider myself aimless. I was reading the journals of Kierkegaard at work and Thomas Carlyle’s History of Frederick the Great at home. Such books, like the prospect of death, concentrated the mind wonderfully.
Soon we were also at odds over the parties.
“Why can’t we spend a little time alone?”
“By alone you mean that I should sit and watch you drink Scotch and read volume five of the life of some German despot.”
“What the hell do you see in those people, Victoria?”
“I see my friends, Ed.”
“God forbid that yo
ur husband should object to working his fingers to the bone feeding them.”
“Don’t start that. It’s the only thing you do around here. You don’t do laundry, you don’t push a vacuum, you do nothing else.”
“I’ll do laundry.”
“You’ll do some hot hors d’oeuvres for Friday night after work. We’re meeting here for drinks and then we’re going out for dinner.”
“Lawd be praise’! This ole house nigra doan have to serve Missy’s dinner!”
“I’ll be late. Give them drinks and hors d’oeuvres, Ed. Hot hors d’oeuvres.”
They got hot hors d’oeuvres. Of course, they considered it a great joke and good, clean fun, but when Victoria came in and saw me she went pale with fury and then started to cry. I was moving among the crowd with a tray, wearing the cardboard bunny ears I’d made at work that afternoon. I was also naked except for the bathing trunks I’d pasted the cotton balls on to make a rabbit tail.
“Don’t you have any pride!” she shouted. “You humiliate me and you humiliate yourself! In front of my friends!”
I’d gone too far again. The parties at our apartment stopped after that; Victoria met her friends elsewhere. I stayed home and read. We began to talk to each other as from a great distance. At times, though, we could still be surprised by happiness. I remember an afternoon I persuaded her to play hooky from work and we went to the racetrack, ate hot dogs, and made two-dollar bets. She was entranced by the gaiety and medieval splendour of the drivers’ silks, the masked and blinkered horses and the flashing precision of their gaits. But even as I sat beside her and looked at her face lit with pleasure I remembered rumours of another man. Later that same year I joined her for ballroom-dancing lessons and we momentarily drew close in a staid, Viennese bourgeois intimacy that felt something like the beginning of a friendship.
But such pastimes could not heal our division. Success had returned to Victoria after an interval of some years. She had said to me once that she could not live without a sense of purpose and a sense of possibility. She had that sense of purpose in her work; now she was waiting on possibility.
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