Evangelista's Fan

by Rose Tremain

  He walked out of the gallery and Leota followed him. For all that day and most of the night, he sat on a chair with a board over his knee, playing Solitaire and mumbling: ‘Cheats and liars! Don’t speak to me . . .’

  There was a side of him which had always been down on things, hard on things, including himself and the factory. Asked what the factory made, he had often replied: ‘We make trash and the cans to put it in.’ He knew ‘plastic’ wasn’t a popular word; it was a word Canadians worried about. Leota reminded him: ‘If you manufactured from wood, Pack, they would worry about the trees, but everything has to be made of something.’ He answered that anxiety wasn’t always rational, any more than despair was rational. ‘Who’s talking about despair?’ asked Leota. ‘Everyone,’ said Packard. ‘Every soul alive.’

  This didn’t seem rational to Leota. She reminded Packard that one of the products made by the factory was an incubator housing. She said: ‘The parents of those babies in your incubators may have been in despair for a while, but when they see their babies aren’t going to die they’re happy as birds.’

  ‘Nah,’ said Packard. ‘Wrong. You don’t see to the heart of things, Leota. They’re happy as birds for a while, only until they remember how easily it was going to come.’

  ‘How easily what was going to come?’

  ‘Death. The whole vanishing thing.’

  ‘Pack,’ said Leota, ‘stop it. You’re a normal man, not a poet. Get your mind on something real. Think of the Blue Jays and the great season they’re having!’

  ‘I don’t give a fly’s arse for the Blue Jays,’ said Pack.

  ‘Why not? Baseball used to be your craze.’

  ‘Well, it’s not any more. I’m through with baseball.’

  Leota thought: it’s OK to be through with a craze if you can replace it with something else, preferably another craze, even something as trivial as TV game shows. Crazes kept people alive. If you didn’t care one way or another about anything, you died. She reminded Pack that Burt Lancaster had kept birds in Alcatraz and this had helped him to go on living, day after day. But Packard only laughed: ‘That dates you, Leota! You saw that film in black and white. It predates your visor.’

  She didn’t mind being teased. Pack was a large man. Large men were often teases. And she’d lived with him for fifty years, just the two of them, no children, no pets, and survived it all and still loved him. But she decided she did mind him getting angry with the world. She minded it for two reasons: 1. she knew that anger takes all the fun and joy out of everything, and 2. it made her feel guilty. It made her wonder whether she shouldn’t start to be angry too – whether anger, when you got old, was the only appropriate emotion left. And she’d always been very accepting of the world, never analysed anything with care. Even in her dreams of Georgia, she saw fireflies, not black workers in the fields with their backs bent. It was shameful when she thought about it. And the people who were angry with everything – like Steve Cairns, the seventeen-year-old son of their neighbours, who fought with his father and stole from local stores and left vomit in the driveway – made her frightened. She couldn’t help it. Steve Cairns terrified her, him and everybody like him, all the angry punks and bullies. She wanted them to leave Canada. She wanted to send them to the frozen moon.

  She lay beside Packard and looked at his white hair on the pillow. She’d noticed, at the unveiling of the black square, that his hair had started to stick out crazily from his head, stiff and wild, as if electricity were fizzing through it. She supposed that fury could generate an electrical charge. Electricity could be made by unexpected things, like the left front door handle of her car, which gave her a slight shock each time she touched it. If Packard’s hair got too straight and startling, it might be time to take him away somewhere, to one of the islands in the Hudson Bay, where there was nothing to feel angry about, no charlatan painters, no trash in the water, no TV news of wars and homelessness. Or, she might advise him, simply, to go to the Falls.

  Pack had been raised within sight of them and had said all his life that he was ‘proud to know the Niagara’. It was there that he went when something upset him. He frequently reminded Leota, when he returned from these expeditions, that 3,000 tons of water per second went over the lip. He said: ‘Most people in the world live hundreds of miles from any astonishing thing. They don’t feel wonder any more. They don’t know how to feel wonder. And it is wonder, Leota, and that alone that keeps man in check. I’m telling you.’

  He didn’t need to tell her, really. She could remember watching the stars over Georgia and everyone on the porch saying they felt small and insignificant. And it wasn’t as though the subject of the Falls didn’t crop up when people visited them from America or England, because it did. One of Packard’s favourite pastimes was to re-tell the stories of the stunters, the people who had tried to defy the Falls in barrels or other contraptions ‘of their own pathetic making’. Packard despised the stunters, ‘the boobies’, as he called them, for trying to make profit from the Falls.

  He denied that they were brave. He said: ‘What’s brave about trying to grab notoriety?’

  The visitors always listened attentively. They seemed enthralled by the stunts. Leota assured them: ‘You don’t have to take Pack’s view of the matter. He knows it’s not the only view.’

  ‘Nah,’ he said, ‘but it’s the only sane view. Take that guy, Stephens, from England. You know what that booby did? To try to keep his barrel the right way up, he stuck a hundred-pound anvil in the base of it and tied his feet to the anvil and his arms to the lid of the barrel . . .’

  Leota always thought, at this point, that she could see the guests trying to remember what an anvil was. She thought an anvil was a hard kind of thing to picture any more. But Pack had pictured it so many times he had no difficulty and he always went straight on. ‘You can see what’s coming, can’t you?’ he said. ‘That stupid guy! When the barrel went over and hit the water, the anvil dropped out the bottom, wham, in the first second. And Stephens went with it. All except his right arm! And that’s the only bit of him they ever found – his damned arm!’

  ‘Oh, no!’ the guests would say, ‘Oh, God! Oh, my!’ And Packard would smile. ‘Stephens was the arch booby,’ he’d say, ‘but there were others. You bet.’

  Packard always referred to Steve Cairns as ‘The Deli’. The nickname amused him. ‘You get it, Leota? It refers both to the word “delinquent” and to the quantity of Russian salad he and his friends leave on the neighbourhood walkways.’

  He’d always sympathised with Mr and Mrs Cairns, said, heavens, if kids are like that, thank God we don’t have any. But now, in his new fury with so many things, he started to invite The Deli into the house for coffee and a smoke. Leota would come into the kitchen and find The Deli sitting with his feet on the table. Occasionally, she made Pack his favourite malted milk and stayed to listen to the conversations. She learned that the Deli’s body was slowly being covered with tattoos; he had a woman’s breast on each knee, a jewel-handled dagger going from his pubic hair to his navel and a raptor on his back. He offered to show them, but Leota said: ‘That’s kind of you, Steve, but no thank you, dear.’

  Later, she said: ‘It’s pathetic, Pack. It’s so juvenile.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Packard, ‘but he’s looked at the grown-up world and he doesn’t like it enough to join it. And who can blame him?’

  ‘That’s the way young people always were,’ said Leota, ‘but they used to want to do something to change it. Now, they just sit around and do things with needles.’

  ‘They see the world’s not susceptible to change any more,’ said Packard. ‘It’s too far gone. Even here in Canada. There’s no decent people any more. So steal from them. Why not? Governments steal. Big Business steals. Packard Plastics steals . . .’

  ‘Hush,’ said Leota. ‘Stop thinking that way. I can’t endure it. We’ve only got a few years . . .’

  ‘Exactly. So let’s wise up. Get rid of your visor. Le
t’s see things as they are.’

  Leota stood up and put her hands on her hips the way her mother used to do when she told off the black maid. ‘Packard,’ she said, ‘I am taking you away.’

  The travel agent found her a cabin on an island in the Hudson Bay. It had its own landing stage and a sixteen-foot fibreglass boat. Firs surrounded the cabin and came down to the edge of the water. It was beaver country. The light from the north was fierce.

  ‘OK,’ said Packard, when they arrived on a late afternoon, ‘this is all right’.

  Outside their bedroom, which faced south over the water, was a wooden balcony. Packard found two faded deck chairs and set them out side by side. ‘Up here,’ he said, ‘we will really be able to see the stars. And by the way, dear, stars are silver, sometimes yellowish, sometimes quite white, but they are never purple.’

  He got two blankets for them and bought a bag of donuts from the only bakery on the island and there they sat, on their second night, eating donuts and staring at the night sky. It was early spring and cold and silent. Packard tucked the blankets round their knees and Leota took off her visor.

  Packard said after a while: ‘I read someplace the galaxy’s in the shape of two fried eggs, back to back. We’re in amongst the white.’

  Leota said: ‘Astronomers try to simplify everything for us, but the things they ask us to imagine are still pretty darned hard.’

  Packard laughed. This was a sound Leota hadn’t heard for a while. Then he said: ‘I like the way the stars mock us. They’re more merciless than the Falls. The Falls are there at least, but up there . . . we think we’re looking at solid worlds, but we’re not, we’re looking at travelling light.’

  ‘Why does it stop travelling?’ asked Leota.

  ‘What?’ said Pack.

  ‘Why does it stop at a fixed point? Why doesn’t it come on and on until it gets so close to us it blinds us?’

  ‘It wouldn’t blind you, Leota. You’d just be in among a sparkling bilberry soup!’

  Pack hadn’t noticed that Leota had taken off the visor, but now he did and he held out his hand, sticky with sugar, for her to hold. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘And for the way I am now. I don’t know why light stops travelling. And I don’t know why I’m so darn mad about everything. I guess I’m just a booby, like all the rest.’

  ‘No you’re not,’ said Leota.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Packard, ‘I’ll be up there in a while. The dead turn into interstellar gas, I bet they do. See that very bright, cold star – that one?’

  ‘Yup. I see it.’

  ‘Look there for me. It’s a waterfall star, must be. I think it’s called Sirius. My gas particles will be popping somewhere there.’

  ‘Hush up, sweetheart,’ said Leota, ‘this is a vacation. So why not live for now?’

  But he didn’t live another day.

  He went out in the fibreglass boat at dawn and a west wind blew in from the Northern Territories and the boat overturned. Packard’s body wasn’t found for seven days. It had been washed ashore on an island so small it was inhabited only by gannets and geese, who pecked at his nose and at his eyes and at his white hair. The police said to Leota: ‘We don’t advise you to see the face, ma’am. Identification from the feet and hands will be sufficient.’

  Leota had never known loneliness. She never could have imagined how much time it consumed. She’d sit for hours and hours, with her chin on her hands, doing nothing and being nothing, except lonely.

  It was not only her years with Packard that she sat there remembering – the building of their house, the summer parties they used to give, their mall shopping, their trips to Europe and the States, their love of Cajun food, and all their early years of passion – but her long-ago childhood slowly gathered shape and colour in her mind, like a developing photograph. Her former self felt weightless, or else winged, like the gnats she’d seen at the time of Jimmy Carter. It floated above the landscape, but what it saw were all the ways the people round her were anchored to the earth. She saw all their endeavour. It never ceased. They struggled and laboured and fought until they died. She said to her friend, Jane: ‘I may have misunderstood it, but I don’t believe these people were angry with the world. I think they loved it to death. But Pack, in his last years, he was so mad at it all. So now I’m confused as well as heartbroken. I don’t know which of them was right.’

  Sometimes, when the nights got warmer, Leota went out into the yard. She sat on a white tin chair and looked at the sky. She was searching for the bright waterfall star Packard had showed her. She moved her head in an arc, like a searchlight. She took off her visor. She ached for Pack to be alive again and by her side, eating donuts, and to show her the star she couldn’t find.

  In her solitude, she found it difficult to eat. It was as if there were interstellar gas in her stomach – Lonely Gas, she called it. And so she began to get smaller and narrower and lighter. Even her head. Jane said to her: ‘It’s not possible that the head of a person can shrink.’ But Leota showed her the band of the visor, which she had had to alter by one notch. She said: ‘If Pack can die in a boat before breakfast, anything is possible.’

  She was now seventy-three years old and had no idea what to look for or how to order the world for the remainder of her life. She knew she couldn’t spend it sitting at a table with her chin on her hands or out in the garden in a tin chair. But the fact remained, she was lost without Packard, literally lost. She had difficulty remembering the route to the hairdressers. Driving the car made her anxious, as if it was going to take her some place that she didn’t recognise and didn’t want to go. She didn’t know, at any one moment, what book she was reading or whether she was enjoying it or not. She had to look up the times of the TV game shows she always used to watch. When she stared at the yard, she thought it looked peculiar, as if someone had arrived in the night and moved the shrubs around.

  In her kitchen, she listened to the radio. She knew it was important to continue to be told what was going on in the outside world, not least because then she could try to make up her mind about Pack’s anger with it. She learned from a radio programme that tigers were disappearing from India, killed by poachers, who sold the bones, ground to bags of dust, to the Chinese. She forgot what the Chinese used the dust for. She was informed that a growth industry in Russia was the sale of human hair. She found these things both disturbing and reassuring; people would do no matter what to stay alive, to buy another week, another day. But then she thought: it’s a shame to kill a tiger or sell your hair for another day; and I have days and weeks and years already bought and I don’t necessarily want them all. It would be better for those people to be given some of my time.

  She knew her thinking was confused. In her narrowing head, her brain was probably getting smaller. Grief for a person or a thing could uncouple the logical part of your mind from the rest of it. In Moscow, there could be women who were going insane, grieving for their hair.

  She sighed at all this. Her sighs had become insubstantial and sounded like the whispers of a child. She told herself that she had to make a plan, find a goal, or else her future would be completely and utterly blank and dark like the black square painting in the town gallery.

  One afternoon, The Deli came round. Leota hadn’t seen him since Packard’s funeral, where she’d noticed that he had a new tattoo in the shape of a heart on his neck. He brought some limp flowers wrapped in paper and laid them on Leota’s kitchen table.

  ‘Thank you, Steve,’ she said. ‘Sit down, dear, won’t you?’

  It was summer now and The Deli was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and torn shorts, exposing the breasts on his knees. Leota could smell sweat on his skinny body. She didn’t want him there.

  He said: ‘I should have come sooner, Mrs Packard. I’m sorry I didn’t.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Leota, ‘there was no need . . .’

  There was a long silence. Leota thought: Pack used to keep Cokes in the refrigerator for when he called.

/>   ‘Can I get you a drink of water?’ she asked.

  ‘No thanks,’ said The Deli. ‘My parents told me you didn’t get out much any more, so I came to say . . .’

  Leota was staring at the heart on his neck. It seemed to be bordered with lace, like the paper heart of a valentine card.

  ‘I can drive now,’ he went on. ‘I passed my test. So I thought, if there was any place you wanted to go . . .’

  Leota looked up. She felt more surprised by what The Deli had just said than by anything she’d seen or heard since the radio programme about tiger bones.

  ‘Why . . .’ she said, falling as she sometimes did into her Georgia drawl, ‘that is most kind of you dear, but—’

  ‘I mean it. I’d like to drive you somewhere.’

  ‘Well . . .’ she said. ‘Well. You know the place I haven’t been in a long time is the Falls . . .’

  ‘OK,’ said The Deli. ‘Sure. The Falls. Why not?’

  Later, lying in bed, Leota thought: why did I say the Falls? That was Pack’s place. What will I do there except get spray on my visor and fill up with Lonely Gas? The truth was, she didn’t want to go any place with Steve Cairns. He might throw up out of the car window. He might kill her with reckless driving. But she knew she’d had to accept his offer. After so long of wanting to ship him off to the moon, this was the least she could do.

  So they went on a bright August day in Mrs Cairns’ Toyota. The Deli drove very fast with one elbow leaning out the window, as if he’d practised driving for fifteen years. Leota examined the lacy heart on his neck and eventually said: ‘Your little heart, dear; it looks very near the jugular vein to me.’

  ‘Yup,’ said The Deli, ‘it is. It’s called a 3.’

  ‘A 3?’

  ‘There are three levels of risk with a tattoo. Most of the body carries level 1 – low risk of any side effect, infection or damage to essential tissue. Level 2 would be, say, medium risk: soles of the feet, which could cause problems through inadvertent reflexology. Then there’s level 3: inside of wrist, genitals and neck, just here.’