“The story?”
“Yes, I’m going to have my class study it, but I wondered what you would make of it. Why, for example, are their postures so different? She’s looking downcast, it seems to me, and he’s, what? Matter-of-fact? Cocky?”
“The meal wasn’t very good, maybe. Or she has indigestion.”
“Richard! You’ve always had insights in the past that have helped me. Be serious, please.”
“All right, let’s see.” He picked up the reproduction and studied it for a moment or two. “I’m guessing they’re brother and sister, and she’s pining for a boyfriend, and the brother is not sympathetic.”
“I don’t know how you can say that! Look at the predominant colour. It’s hot, passionate. And look at the flowers on the sideboard. They’re leaning way over, sort of drooping, not like a normal bouquet at all. It suggests the couple have just had sex, that sex was the ‘meal’ and coffee and fruit the dessert. And that she was disappointed in their lovemaking. And probably just generally disappointed in him. Look at him! A punk.”
“That theory seems like a stretch.”
“No, it isn’t at all. I’ll bet if I surveyed people, nine out of ten would agree with me. I think you’re being wilfully obtuse.”
“If you were already so sure of the ‘story,’ why did you ask me about it? The minute I sat down, I felt like it was some sort of test.”
“Yes, well, I didn’t intend it to be, but it seems to me now that you can’t even recognize a sexual situation. Never mind be part of one.”
Richard stood up. “Good night,” he said. “I’m going to bed.”
“I’m sorry,” Carol called. “I just blurted that out. It wasn’t fair.”
“Yes, well, we’re a sorry pair,” Richard called back.
February 2012
Richard,
I remember that evening. I think I was baiting you, but I was so frustrated and angry.
I don’t know if it was the same night — it was a night of one of your long walks — when I watched a documentary on Bob Dylan’s concerts in the 1960s. Joan Baez took the stage, and when she had sung, started calling for Dylan to come back on. “Come to the stage, Bobby. Is Bobby there?” Poor deluded girl, I thought. The “Bobby” was so telling. She thought he was hers, tame, a lovely, tame poet — an oxymoron if there ever was one.
I believed you were tame, that you would never be beyond my wants, never out of reach. But no one owns anyone and no one stays the same forever, and you had your reasons for going into the wilderness.
Carol
Dear Carol,
I was tame, and now I’m tame again, whipped and in a cage.
Richard
Richard,
I think the very fact that you’ve written this book disproves your last statement.
Carol
FOURTEEN
“CAROL, THERE’S SOMETHING I have to tell you. Come and sit down.”
It was 10:00 p.m. and Carol had just come home from a faculty meeting, having gone for drinks afterward. “You’re scaring me. You look so grim.”
“No, no. It’s nothing serious. Well, it’s serious, but not really for us.”
“Who, then? Stop pacing. I need a glass of wine. Sit down.” Carol opened a bottle of chilled white wine, poured herself a glass. “Want one?” she asked, and Richard shook his head.
They sat at the table. “Okay. Who’s dead or dying?”
“No one. There’s this girl, Emily. She works on the street.”
“Selling flowers? Jewellery?”
“No.”
“She’s a hooker? You know a hooker?”
“Yes, well, but she’s in trouble. I saw her one day a while ago and spoke to her and I didn’t have a class today and I was going to the drugstore and she was at the edge of the park on Nanaimo Street and she recognized me. She has a black eye and bruises and said her boyfriend was threatening to hurt her more and could I help her?”
“Jesus, Richard.”
“Anyway, she’s here.”
“Here? In the house?” Carol’s voice rose with incredulity.
“She’s resting in the spare room. She was in worse shape than I first thought.”
“Shit, Richard. What were you thinking?”
“I didn’t know what else to do.”
“You could have called the police.”
“It didn’t seem right. She was stoned — might have ended up at the police station instead of being looked after. I couldn’t just leave her there. The boyfriend might have come back.”
Richard stood up and paced from sink to fridge and back again. He glanced into the sink at the empty glass Emily had drunk milk from, gulping it like a parched child. That was all she’d wanted before she went to lie down on a cot in the spare room. He’d wanted to take her to the hospital, but she’d refused. She’d been wearing the same red tank top and white plastic boots as the first time he’d seen her, with only a thin white shirt, unbuttoned, over it. He hadn’t noticed, that first time, how extremely thin she was. Her breasts were small beneath the tight top, and her thighs were no bigger than his upper arm. He’d wanted to pick her up and carry her to safety — she would have been no heavier than a twelve-year-old — but she’d managed to get into the taxi and then into the house without help. He’d looked in on her as she slept. She’d taken off her boots and he’d almost cried when he saw her white ankle socks, decorated with Japanese cartoon kittens. He’d adjusted the blanket to cover her shoulders and her feet, then left quietly.
“She can’t stay here,” Carol said.
“Just overnight. She’s in bad shape. Tomorrow I’ll see if I can get her to a safe house of some kind.”
“You’re not a goddamned social worker.”
“No, and you’re not hard-hearted. Try to be sympathetic.”
“I’m only trying to be practical. We can’t look after such a … such a troubled girl. We might get into trouble with the authorities. How old is she?”
“She said she was eighteen.”
“I guess child welfare won’t be after us, then, if she gets sicker in our care. If she’s telling the truth. I’ll go and talk to her.”
“She’s asleep. Wait until the morning.”
“How bad is she?”
“Black eye. Cut lip. I gave her Polysporin to put on it. Bruises on her arms and legs. And weary. God, Carol. So weary. As though she’s lived eighty years, not eighteen, and seen everything. Everything horrible.”
“All right, Richard. All right. I know you’re being kind, but we don’t really know anything about her. These damaged girls are complicated, and sometimes dangerous. At the very least, she means heartache for you; at worst, trouble. Honestly, I can’t take the stress of this right now. And I just thought of something else. Could her boyfriend look for her here?”
“How would he know where to look?”
“Does she have a cellphone?”
“I don’t know. But she was so desperate to get away from him. Why would she call him?”
“I guess you’re right. Desperate and weary, as you say. I’ll just look in on her, though. Make sure she’s not in any distress, breathing normally and everything.” She stopped in the doorway, looked back. “I’m really pissed off with you, you know.”
Richard followed her into the spare room. The girl was curled up in the fetal position, the blanket kicked off. Carol went closer. She put her hand on the girl’s forehead. It was cool and her breathing seemed normal.
“I think she’s all right,” Carol said. “I’ll see if she’ll let me take her to a clinic tomorrow morning. I hope to god she doesn’t lapse into a coma or something in the meantime.”
Richard and Carol both slept fitfully. At 2:00 a.m., Carol shook Richard awake. “I hear noises,” she said.
She got up and ran out of the bedroom, Richard close behind. They found the front door ajar. Emily was gone.
“I think I heard voices, too,” Carol said.
Richard went out the fron
t door to the sidewalk. He saw Emily with a man. They were about a block away, running. He shouted, “Come back!” He started to run, too, but they were faster, and he stopped and went back to the house.
Why was he chasing them, anyway? Emily had always been free to go. But why was she running?
When he got into the house, he got his answer. Carol shouted, “They’ve taken my soapstone carving. And my grandmother’s emerald-and-gold brooch. The only keepsake I have of her. I foolishly left it by the sink in the bathroom last night. How could you, Richard? How could you? Call the police.”
“No.”
“No? Richard, she stole my things. Call the police.”
“It could have been her boyfriend who stole them. I don’t want to get her into trouble. He might have coerced her. Probably did.”
“I don’t care.” Carol picked up the phone and started to punch in 911, but Richard grabbed it from her and slammed it onto the table.
Carol stood stunned in the middle of the kitchen, the harsh ceiling light shining on her dishevelled hair and making the circles under her eyes darker. She seemed to have had a lot to drink that evening. One strap of her short, blue-satin nightie slipped off her shoulder. Her lower lip trembled.
“You look like a mess,” Richard said and immediately regretted it.
Carol’s reaction made him step back, wobble, hold the table for support. She screamed, a high-pitched shriek, ran to him, and pounded his bare chest with her fists. “Bastard, bastard,” she kept repeating.
Richard grabbed her wrists and held them, and after struggling for a moment, she let out a long sigh and cried, her body drooping. He tried to embrace her, but she pushed him away, sat down at the table.
“You take away my husband — no, you know what I mean. You withhold yourself from me. Not a proper husband, and now, now, you rob me of my belongings and make my home unsafe.”
“It’s not unsafe.”
Carol stood up and ran to the hallway. She came back to the kitchen with the spare key that was kept under the blue pottery bowl. “She could have taken this and nothing else, hoping we hadn’t noticed the key was missing, and come back and cleaned us out.”
“But she didn’t. We’re safe, Carol. She won’t be back.”
“First my house falls on me, almost kills me, and now this. My new home feels dangerous. It has been violated. Oh, shit, Richard. You make me do things I never dreamed I would ever do.”
“What? What things?”
“Yelling at you like that. Hitting you. I’m so angry and hurt that you put that pathetic girl ahead of me. Ahead of my security. And now you won’t call the police.”
“It’s just that it wouldn’t do any good. They’ll pawn or sell the things before the police could ever track her down. We have no evidence. And I don’t know where she lives — not even her last name.”
Carol stared at him, and Richard saw something in her eyes, some pain deeper than that caused by the night’s events.
“What other things, Carol? That you never dreamed you would do? There’s something else, isn’t there?”
He could see she was struggling with whether to speak or not. He waited, hardly breathing.
“I had an affair,” she said.
Richard felt his blood turn to ice. He heard a moth battering itself to death in the light fixture, heard the fridge motor, heard a car engine starting, heard his heartbeat thundering in his ears.
“Richard, I’m sorry, I can’t go on like this.”
“Who is it?” he asked coldly.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Tell me who it is.”
“No one you know. It’s over now, anyway.”
“How long?”
“Not long. It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters — it all matters.” He left the kitchen and came back, wearing a shirt. “I was cold,” he said. It was about twenty degrees Celsius in the room. “Tell me, Carol.”
“Richard, please. I’ve started therapy. To help me deal with everything. It won’t happen again — the affair, I mean.”
Richard stared at her until she looked away. Finally, he said, “I can’t go on like this, either. I’m causing you pain, craziness. I’ll move out.”
“Richard, no!”
“I’ll find another place this week. I can’t give you what you need, and I can’t bear thinking of you with another man. We don’t even have honesty between us. You’re not being completely open with me even now.”
Now it was Carol’s turn to stare, open-mouthed. “What fucking condescending, egotistical nerve!” she said. “You giving me an ultimatum, after bringing thieves into the house. After becoming a goddamned monk. And that girl. Did you have a thing for her? Is it just me you can’t get it up for? Bloody well go, then. I won’t stop you.”
“That’s unfair, Carol, and you know it.”
Carol opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of white wine. “I’m tired of talking. I’m going to sit here and get drunk.”
“You’ve been doing that a lot lately.”
Carol glared at him.
“I’ll sleep on the couch,” he said.
“Why bother?”
“I’ll be gone by the end of the week.” He left the room.
“Fine,” Carol said. She stood, lost her balance, and bumped her thigh sharply on the edge of the table. She swore.
Richard, in the bedroom, stood staring into the closet, the way people stare absent-mindedly into a refrigerator.
Carol found him like that. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“Looking for a blanket,” he said.
She went to him, put her arms around him. He stood with his arms rigidly by his sides and continued to look over Carol’s shoulder into the closet.
“Richard, let’s not do this. Please don’t go.”
“I have to,” he said.
Carol let him out of her embrace and crouched down to get a blanket from a basket on the closet floor.
“Here,” she said. She gave him the blanket and a pillow from the bed. Richard looked back as he was leaving the room and saw her tears. He recalled her emphatic “fine” when he said he would leave. But he was afraid that nothing would ever be fine again.
FIFTEEN
CAROL HAD BEEN sleeping poorly since Richard had moved out a week earlier. Tired and sad, she’d been finding it hard to concentrate on her work. Luckily, she had taught today’s class many times and knew the material thoroughly. It was “The Importance of Women Artists,” part of her Art History 101 course, to which she devoted two classes.
She began, as always, by reading part of a letter written by Gustav Mahler to his wife, Alma, before she had consented to marry him. Carol had developed a fascination for her through studying the painter Kokoschka, who had been madly in love with Alma, a muse to several prominent artists of her time. One biographer said she had seemed to need around her “the mystique of the artist” — the male artist — even though she was a composer herself. Why wasn’t being the artist enough? Carol thought, and felt the accelerated pulse in her throat. Each time she read the letter aloud, she felt as angry as she had the first time.
“The roles in this play must be correctly assigned,” Mahler began. “The role of ‘composer,’ the ‘worker’s world,’ falls to me — yours is that of the loving companion and understanding partner! Are you satisfied with it? You must renounce all superficiality, all convention, all vanity and delusion. You must give yourself to me unconditionally, shape your future life, in every detail, entirely in accordance with my needs and desire nothing in return save my love.”
“And he wanted her answer ‘before Saturday,’” Carol said, anger evident in her voice. “He said having two composers in the marriage was ridiculous, degrading, and competitive. This even though Alma was considered a promising composer.” Carol leaned against her desk to steady herself. “Any comments?”
She always felt nervous at this point, afraid some dismissive remark might make her temper
flare. There were fifteen women and three men in this class, but it took only one man, as had happened last year, to push her over the edge. He’d said, the chauvinistic asshole, “Well, there haven’t been a lot of great women artists, so maybe he was trying to save her from disappointment.”
She’d railed then about how so many women had been relegated to artistic oblivion; most of her students leaned back rigidly in their seats, as though pinned there by a strong wind.
Now a young man put up his hand.
“Connor?”
“Mahler was a great composer,” Connor said. “Probably a lot greater than Alma would ever have been.”
There it is.
The class remained in tense silence. Carol took a deep breath.
“How can we know that?” she said, quietly, reasonably. “If Alma had no opportunity to develop her talent?” A vein in her neck was throbbing and her cheeks felt hot. “The same thing applies to women painters — which, of course, is what this section of the course is about. If they aren’t given time and space, and if galleries don’t show them and critics don’t discuss them, how can they reach their full potential? And who are the arbiters of aesthetics; who are the gallery owners? And who defines greatness?”
“Men!” a woman called out, without a second of hesitation.
“White men!” another called.
“Half-dead white men!” another woman shouted, and almost everyone laughed.
“Yes, well, too bad it isn’t funny,” Carol said. “This was all well argued and documented in the nineteen-seventies, so you’d think some progress would have been made, but very little has changed. Google it. Find out what percentage of artists shown in galleries today are women. And how many are given one-person shows.”
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