In the Language of Love

by Diane Schoemperlen

Now she said, not unkindly, “It matters to me.” She poured drinks and ironed some more. She finally settled on a very conservative pale grey shirtdress left over from her bank teller days.

  “It’s fine,” Lewis said. “It’s beautiful, you are always beautiful.” He held her beside the ironing board, burying his face in her damp curly hair. He said, “I can smell you in the heat.” They made love on the cool kitchen floor, not taking off their clothes, just rearranging them so they could get at each other.

  Lewis left first. They met at the church and sat together in a pew near the back. Joanna wondered if they smelled of sex. All around them people were weeping softly and Joanna cried too. She hadn’t known Walter Hicks very well but she liked to think he would have understood, perhaps even applauded, their need to make love, loud animal inelegant love, in the face of death and losing everything. Love, it seemed, was the only defence they could muster. Love, it seemed, was the only defiance left to any of them.

  Joanna could not imagine being with Lewis in the winter. She worried that it was somehow the heat that held them together. Maybe when the winter came, they would turn back into themselves, into the simple admirable selves they’d been before they fell in love. The months of their romance might become nothing more than an unlikely hallucination, a steamy half-remembered dream. But the summer ended, the autumn passed, Christmas, then New Year’s, and still they remained lovers, true lovers, bound.

  In the winter, Lewis loved to skate. Joanna loved it too, but only at night, only alone. Once or twice a week around ten o’clock she would gather up her skates and walk the few blocks to Patterson Park where there were two regulation hockey rinks encircled by a general skating area. In the late afternoon and early evening all available ice surfaces were noisy and jumping with children of all sizes and levels of ability, skimming past or flopping down at unpredictable moments in their colourful well-padded snowsuits. There were picturesque rosy-cheeked couples in hand-knit his-and-hers skating sweaters, holding mittened hands and gliding gracefully round and round, grinning at each other. On the hockey rinks, there were aggressive athletic young men (of which Lewis was often one) on pick-up teams body-checking each other with gusto and slapping the puck against the boards so hard that the wood rang like crystal in the frozen air.

  Late one February afternoon Joanna walked over to the rink. Lewis had said he was going to play hockey for an hour before supper. Joanna didn’t bring her skates. She didn’t want to skate, she only wanted to see him, and she wanted it to look like a coincidence, her arriving there just as he was stealing the puck in his nice tight sweatpants, racing head-down towards the net in his woolly fisherman-knit sweater, scoring a goal in all his lean splendour.

  She stood back from the boards and watched him play for five minutes before he spotted her. He skated over, flushed and sweaty, clutching his black-taped stick like an oar or a weapon. He said, “I knew you’d come.” Was she that predictable? Was he that sure of her? Was he that sure of himself?

  He said, “I mean, I hoped you would come,” but the other players were hollering for him so he just shrugged and skated away. Joanna regretted having stepped out of their secret romance and into the rest of his world. She hated him briefly for knowing her so well, for knowing that she couldn’t stay away. She hated him for supposing that now she would hang around to watch him play, stamping her feet in the cold, cheering him on, admiring him and aching inside. She turned away and went home. How long, she wondered, would it take him to even notice she was gone?

  The next day he told her that Wanda had shown up at the rink not five minutes after she’d left. “You must never come there again,” he said. “It’s too risky.” Another line drawn.

  And so she never did. But she kept on with her solitary night skating. The ice was empty then, and as she laced up her skates on a snowbank, the ice and the stars sparkled simultaneously into the silence and her breath was white upon the darkness. She skated round and round, aimlessly, endlessly round and round, like the plastic ballerina which had twirled on top of a tiny mirror in her first jewellery box, spinning frantically at first to the accelerated strains of Swan Lake, then slowly, more slowly, until dancer and music together ran down and stopped.

  As a child she’d always skated in the dark. After supper, after homework, she had walked across the railroad tracks to Montgomery Park with her white figure skates slung over her shoulder, the blades tucked into their red plastic guards. She put them on in the shack. She tucked her snow boots with the skate guards stuck inside them underneath the green wooden bench and hit the ice. Sometimes Penny and Pamela came too. If not, she skated alone, forwards, backwards, practising her figure-eights until they were perfect. Back in the shack to warm up, the girls compared skates, whose teeth were sharper, what were they for anyway, why didn’t the boys’ skates have teeth, why were the boys’ skates black?

  Around nine o’clock or so, Clarence would walk over and watch them skate, him smoking with his hands in his pockets, Joanna embarrassed because none of the other fathers were there, but happy too, showing off for him, letting him unlace her skates back in the shack, letting him rub her half-frozen feet, letting him carry the skates over his shoulder as they walked in silence down the dark railroad tracks home.

  Joanna and Samuel have just driven Clarence to the airport. They are driving home down dark icy streets clogged with creeping cars spewing clouds of exhaust and occasionally spinning their wheels furiously, ineffectually, like dogs losing traction on a stretch of shiny linoleum. It is the coldest night of the winter so far. The Christmas visit is over again and Joanna is more than ready to resume her real life. She feelsguilty for feeling relieved to have put her father on that plane and sent him home to his empty little house.

  It has been seven years since Esther died. It has been seven years since her romance with Lewis ended. Joanna always thinks of these two losses together. She is always mixing up her mother and her lover in her head, although they never met, never would or could have, never will now. Lewis had been away for the weekend with Wanda when Joanna got the call from Clarence. Clarence not crying but choking as he told her her mother was dead. Joanna crying alone, then calling Clarence’s neighbour to go over and comfort him. She went downtown to the travel agent to book her flight home the next day. When the agent asked, “Business or pleasure?” Joanna said, “Neither. My mother died.” The agent was embarrassed and could not look at her when the ticket and the cheque changed hands.

  Samuel in the back seat now is a little sniffly and teary-eyed. Clarence was too when he shuffled through Security and set off the metal detector because he’d forgotten to take his keys out of his pocket. Samuel is consoled when Joanna says, “Don’t worry, he’ll be back again next Christmas, maybe we’ll see him in the summer, he’ll call tonight for sure, don’t worry.”

  But as the years go by, Joanna wonders if each Christmas will be the last. She thinks of how Clarence shuffles now, of how each time she sees him, he has aged in the interim, losing ground when she’s not looking. She is swamped by mixed emotions. Are there any other kind?

  As they draw closer to the house (where Gordon will be home from work by now, waiting to warm them with laughter, hugs, hot chocolate, spaghetti sauce bubbling on the back burner), they pass a lone figure trudging down the sidewalk where the snow has frozen into treacherous ruts and furrows. It is a woman in a long padded parka, a white scarf wrapped round and round her head and her face so that only her eyes are showing. She holds one red mitten over her mouth. It is Wanda.

  What on earth is she doing walking in the dark on the coldest night of the year? Where is she going? What is she running from? No, she’s not running, she’s just picking her way through the ice,she’s just walking slowly away. How could Lewis let her out on a night like this? Joanna has always thought of Wanda as delicate, fragile and frail, looking pale and thin like a plant. Now, after seven years, she sees that Wanda is tougher than anyone would ever guess, than anyone, including Lewis, would ev
er give her credit for.

  Now she is swamped with guilt, more guilt, and tenderness. But if she rolls down the window and opens her mouth to offer Wanda a ride, she thinks she will spit out blood, her own blood, or poison, her own poisoned blood, or semen, gallons of the semen she swallowed seven years ago.

  25. SLOW

  WHEN JOANNA FIRST STARTS SEEING Gordon, she wants to proceed with caution. Fools rush in, haste makes waste, the tortoise and the hare, slow and steady wins the race, all of that. “I want to go slow,” she says to him often. The fact that they have already slept together, are in fact in bed together when she first says this, does not strike her as contradictory.

  “Slowly,” Gordon says.

  “Yes, I want to go slow,” Joanna repeats.

  “Slowly,” Gordon says again and Joanna realizes that he is correcting her grammar rather than agreeing with her.

  She wants to stay in control this time. It has been a full year since her romance with Lewis ended. Her feelings for Gordon are not at all like those she had for Lewis. Although it seems unfair and unfaithful, she cannot help comparing the two, not the men themselves so much as her own feelings for them. Then, with Lewis, she felt consumed, engulfed, enveloped. Ablaze, awash, aflame. Overwhelmed, overpowered, overcome. Now, with Gordon, she feels calm, quiet, satisfied, secure, confident, content, tender, and damn near serene. She does not want her love this time to have anything to do with fire, water, or power. She does not want to be railroaded, steamrolled, or swept away—by tidal wave, hurricane, tornado, volcano, cyclone, monsoon, typhoon, or any other unmanageable force of nature. Now she is hoping against hope that she can be in love and not insane.

  With Lewis she had either been higher than high or lower than low. There had been scarcely any middle ground, that bland flat territory she had in fact scorned as the habitual uninspired residence of lesser mortals. She was fond of saying then that contentment was for cows. Now she craves that legendary middle ground.

  She has, she supposes, grown up. But occasionally, on sleepless nights or fretful mornings with the prospect of another calm and orderly day unrolling before her, she wonders if she has given up. What is the difference between acceptance and resignation? If Lewis was the grand passion of her life (and she is pretty sure he was, cannot imagine love getting grander or more passionate than that), then where does that leave Gordon?

  She has told Gordon about her affair with Lewis in some (though not graphic) detail. Gordon appears to accept the possibility that she may still have some residual feelings for Lewis. He says they are not feelings so much as memories of feelings, which is a whole different thing. If he is jealous, he keeps it to himself. He says we all have our baggage. He says her feelings for Lewis do not necessarily take away from her feelings for him. She is impressed by his maturity and only occasionally wants to shake him.

  She is afraid, not of being hurt, but of being overwhelmed. She thinks that saying they should go slowly will actually make it true. As if, contrary to popular proverbial wisdom, her words will speak louder than her actions and she will be protected from her own obsessive romantic urgency.

  Gordon agrees with her, affably, “Yes, you’re right. We should go slowly. We’ve both made mistakes before. This time we can get it right if we’re careful.” This decided, they make love again and fall asleep.

  They are at Gordon’s apartment, a small one-bedroom suite on the fourth floor of an unremarkable eight-storey building. All the apartments have balconies surrounded with black cast-iron railings and cluttered with lawn chairs, bicycles, and barbecues. Some people have put up window boxes filled with red geraniums. Other people hang their laundry on the railing instead. Inside all the apartments are identical, one-and two-bedroom models, the basic floor plan flipped right or left.

  In Gordon’s apartment all the walls are white and all the furniture is brown. The couch is brown plaid which, unfortunately, reminds Joanna of her mother’s dinner plates. It is a large manly couch, a bulky brown plaid atoll in the middle of the nearly empty living room. She has seen this couch in the apartments of many other single men. Although Gordon has lived here for several years, the apartment still looks unfinished. He has not yet gotten around to decorating. There are framed prints and paintings leaning against the walls, still waiting to be hung. There are many cardboard boxes stacked in the storage closet, still waiting to be unpacked. There are books in precarious piles, still waiting to be shelved. For that matter, there is a bookcase in a large flat box, still waiting to be assembled.

  In Gordon’s bedroom there is a king-size bed and an eight-drawer double dresser. On the floor there is a jumble of clothes, books, magazines, and unopened junk mail. Under the bed among the hairy dustballs there are three pairs of underwear, two dirty plates, one dirty sock, many dirty Kleenexes, and one used condom which has been there so long it’s gone hard like a curious fossil. It reminds her of the dead baby birds she used to see on the sidewalk on the way to school, their tiny opalescent bodies curled up and crispy. Joanna knows what is under Gordon’s bed because sometimes when she has spent the night and Gordon has gone off to work early in the morning, she stays and sleeps a little longer, warmly cocooned in the middle of the vast bed, the blankets which smell like him pressed to her nose. She sleeps a little longer and then she snoops.

  She snoops with a lump of guilt in her throat and an exhilarating knot of suspense in her stomach. She sips a mug of coffee and looks under the bed. She munches on a piece of brown toast and goes through all eight of his dresser drawers. She is looking for secrets: love letters, photographs, diaries, clues to Gordon’s other life. What makes her think Gordon has another life? What does she expect to find? A wedding picture perhaps, him arm in arm with a wife he forgot to mention? Cancelled support payment cheques for six children in Alaska? A box of syringes and a Baggie full of heroin? A series offull-colour photographs of him engaged in sexual intercourse with a dog, a horse, a leopard, or eight-year-old Siamese twins? A warrant for his arrest for an unspecified but major international crime? A gun and a box of silver bullets, half-empty? A skeleton in the closet, so to speak? Well, perhaps not a whole skeleton, not in a dresser drawer. Perhaps a set of finger bones strung on a twenty-four-carat gold chain.

  In seven of the drawers, she finds clothes, many clothes, all clean and ironed and neatly folded, arranged according to season. In the top left drawer she finds balls of socks and underwear, a badly tarnished peace sign medallion, a bundle of paid utility bills, a catalogue of hand-tied fishing flies, and a box of wooden matches.

  Is it possible that Gordon has already told her everything she needs to know? Is it possible that Gordon has nothing to hide? That she has nothing to fear? That he will be boring and she will like it?

  For the first month Joanna keeps snooping and warning him that she wants to go slowly. Then she begins to lose her fear. They spend more time at her place because it is cosier and better equipped. It begins to look like they are going to live together. It begins to look like they are going to live together happily ever after. They are not exactly planning this out loud but after two months it has begun to look like the next logical step.

  In retrospect, Joanna will have to admit that, despite her warnings, the only thing slow about it was the way Gordon liked to put his penis into her, slowly, drawing it out again slowly, back inside slowly, slowly, until she thought she would scream and sometimes did as she came four, five, six, seven times.

  26. WISH

  AT VARIOUS TIMES in her life Joanna has wished for various things, invoking various traditional methods to make her dreams come true.

  She has blown out many candles on many birthday cakes and then wished like crazy for a piano, a set of encyclopedias, a pure white Persian kitten, a pink satin blouse like Penny’s.

  She has snapped many wishbones from many turkeys and thenwished like mad for a date, a thousand dollars, new parents, peace on earth, good will towards men.

  She has spotted many twinkling stars and cha
nted many times: Starlight, star bright,/First star I see tonight,/I wish I may, I wish I might,/Have the wish I wish tonight.

  She has tossed many shiny pennies into many allegedly magical fountains and wishing wells, then wished fervently for a car, a husband, new hair, a good night’s sleep.

  On certain occasions, Joanna has wished she was somebody else.

  In the dream Joanna has just been given the one thing in the world she has always wanted the most. In the dream she knows exactly what it is, but when she wakes up she can’t remember, left only with a sense of serene pleasure, an image of whiteness which suffuses her whole morning with gentle satisfaction and thanksgiving.

  Sometimes now Joanna thinks she has everything she has ever wished for in her entire life.

  27. RIVER

  JOANNA REMEMBERS SITTING on the banks of a river with a man. At the secluded spot where they sat on a wide flat rock with their knees drawn up to their chins, the water spread out before them in a deep still pool. Farther down there was a waterfall, its headlong turbulence hidden around a corner but filling their heads with a rushing sound which was either comforting or frightening.

  Joanna was not an outdoor person then and she is still not. She thinks of herself as an indoor person. She feels more comfortable in buildings, with four walls, a floor, and a ceiling around her. Outdoors she feels exposed and self-conscious, as if she were being watched and found foolish. Outdoors she feels clumsy, unsteady, and light-headed, as if she might fall over any minute for no reason. She knows that being outdoors, communing with nature, is supposed to be relaxing, replenishing, generally good for the soul, but she always ends up feeling sulky and sometimes even tearful with wanting to go home. This young man with his pale skin and soft white hands was probably not an outdoor person either and yet, unaccountably, there they were.

  She remembers that she was wearing tight white shorts and a skimpy green halter top with a yellow apple embroidered on the front. The man too was wearing shorts and no shirt, so that when he stood to skip rocks across the quiet pool his shoulders were shiny in the heat. He was tall beside her in the sun, casting a cool shadow across her. She remembers wishing that he would sit back down and put his arm around her. He did.