Carrie looked more amused than insulted—she loved the challenge of a good argument—but Jonathan was clearly incensed by the attack on the woman who had dumped him and made his life a misery for years.
“Back off, David,” he said, and as I looked to see how the man would respond, I knew I was looking at Mr. C.’s son.
Perhaps, had I not known he was a friend of Jonathan’s, had I not half-expected him to be at the party, I would not have been able to place so quickly whose features I was looking at. But I had known; I had more than half-expected. What I hadn’t expected was to find him attractive.
He wasn’t a particularly handsome man, but he was attractive in an unusual sort of way. His eyes were large and deeply set in a face so unpadded with flesh that the contours of his skull were clearly visible. And there was a matching leanness to his body, a spareness that was physical and yet seemed to me a manifestation of character, of a personality that eschewed the extraneous, be it flesh or social niceties.
Jonathan was talking—had been talking for some time already—about whether the universe is ordered by sentience or some other force. After a while other people began to join in. I heard voices raised, lowered, but I didn’t hear the content of their words because my attention was entirely on David C.
He was bored, I thought. Bored with the talk, an endlessly proliferating mass of words as thick as the smoke in the room, bored with the company, bored with the party. He took the joint that was passed to him and passed it along without smoking it. And then, a moment later, he rose and left the circle.
The talk was getting stupider, people acting the way they thought they were supposed to act when they were stoned: laughing about things that weren’t funny, vacuuming up the bowls of chips and plates of cookies that someone had placed in the centre of the circle. I waited for David Czernowitz to return, but when the joint came around to me a second time, I realized he wasn’t coming back, that he might not have just left the circle, but the party. I rose, shook the leg that was tingling with pins and needles from having been folded underneath me for too long, and moved towards the one room that always served as a place of refuge for the awkward and uncoupled at parties like this, the kitchen, which was a fluorescent-lit galley with a low, stained ceiling and mustard-coloured appliances. Bags of chips and pretzels were piled on the counter, paper plates and plastic cups stacked neatly beside them; bottles of wine and soft drinks filled the sink. And at the far wall of the galley, David, facing the wall, his back to the room.
He was engaged in conversation with a woman whom he seemed to have pinned against the wall. He hovered over her with one hand on the wall just above her head and one on the wall beside her shoulder. The pinning was more psychological in nature than physical, since he wasn’t actually touching her, but it would have taken a deft physical move on her part to duck and slide out from under him. I couldn’t tell whether it was seduction or combat I had walked in on, a flow of rage or lust that was passing between them—the volume of their voices was too low for me to hear the content. I was the only other person in the kitchen and knew I should leave, but my curiosity about him was more powerful than my sense of tact or good manners, so I stayed where I was, telling myself it was public space, after all, and busied myself with reorganizing the plastic cups into shorter stacks.
“As you wish,” I heard the woman say, then she lifted his arm—the one beside her shoulder—as if it were a gate and walked out of the kitchen.
He didn’t move, was still holding his position, one hand on the wall just above the spot where her head had been a moment earlier, the other arm back in place an inch from where her shoulder would have been if she were still standing there, which she wasn’t, so anyone entering the kitchen at that moment would think he was simply leaning against the wall rather than hovering over the emptiness that had been filled just a moment earlier by a living, breathing woman. Anyone just entering the kitchen at that moment might reasonably conclude, in fact, that he was ill or upset, especially since his face was now pressed into his upper arm, a posture that suggested suppressed tears or rage or nausea, or some combination of the three, and was exactly the posture his father had assumed during one of his crying episodes in our classroom almost a decade earlier.
After a moment he dropped his arms and turned around. He pretended not to notice my presence, took a plastic cup from the stack I had just rearranged and poured himself a glass of Orange Crush. I also took a cup and held it out as a way to break into his attention. He filled my cup without looking at me. “I’m Ruth,” I said. He glanced at me then. His eyes were brown, calm, uninterested. “David,” he said.
“Ruth Kramer,” I added.
He drank from his cup, then met my eyes again, his expression conveying to me his hope that with this exchange of information we could bring our conversation to a close. “David Czernowitz.”
“Nice to meet you.” And when he didn’t return the pleasantry: “Was that your girlfriend?”
“I’m hoping she still is.”
“I didn’t mean …”
“To intrude?”
“I was just trying to make conversation.”
He was like an electrical wire that had been stripped of its sheathing. I wanted to make contact. I didn’t question why. I drank my cup of Orange Crush while casting about for something to say. “Coffee or mould?” I asked brightly, pointing to the light brown stain on the ceiling that was just inches above our heads.
He shifted his eyes upward for a moment, shrugged.
“Do you know whose apartment this is?” I plodded on.
“Mine.”
“Ah. Well, it must be nice to have your own place.”
“Not really.”
“Not really?” I smiled, but he didn’t smile back. “So, what, you’re being forced to live on your own?”
He gave me a long, bored look. “Who do you suggest I live with?”
“I don’t know. Your parents … your girlfriend …”
“She won’t even sleep with me, so it’s unlikely she’ll move in with me.”
“Poor baby.”
“Do you want to sleep with me?”
The question was like the sting of a wasp, the poison of it taking a second to spread within me. I took his words at face value at first and was merely confused, the question having come out of an exchange coloured by his obvious indifference to me. But then I felt the insult he intended. He found me entirely undesirable, but would sleep with me anyway if that’s what I was after and it would put an end once and for all to this tedious conversation we were having. I looked at him. His face was a hard challenge.
“I’m engaged,” I answered, perhaps to let him know that there was a man who did desire me, who loved me, in fact.
“Is that a yes or a no?”
“This really isn’t a conversation I want to be having.”
“No one’s forcing you to have it.”
And still I didn’t leave. “I knew your father,” I said.
And now he looked at me.
“He was my teacher.”
He waited to hear what I was going to say. What on earth could I say? We went after him like a pack of dogs who sniff weakness? We ejected him like a drop of pus from a wound that’s just beginning to fester, not understanding that the pus is the symptom, not the source of our infection? I looked at his face, at the sharp line of his jaw and the ridges of his bones, which I had wanted to run my finger along from the first moment I saw him, a desire that had not diminished despite what had passed between us.
“You look like him.”
No response. Did he know, then? I wondered. Know what? That I had been part of the young, healthy pack who had driven his ruined father from our sight so we wouldn’t feel his ruination as our own? “How is he?”
“Fine.”
What else would he say to someone like me? Someone with normal parents, he probably assumed. Canadian parents. Someone who couldn’t begin to understand what it was like to have been
born of a soul-breaking grief.
“I’m glad,” I said.
I still wanted to touch his face. So I did. I reached out my hand and he didn’t pull away. I felt the ridge of his cheek and the hollow beneath, cool at first, then warm as blood rushed in beneath my touch. I felt the smoothness of his brow as I swept my open hand across its surface, the fullness of his lips, the mask of his boredom falling away. His face, when I removed my hand, was a boy’s. And before it could harden again, I imprinted his mouth with my thumb. “I’m not who you think I am,” I whispered.
“AH, YOU’RE EARLY,” Ida greeted me, though we hadn’t actually set a definite time.
Reuben had presented me with my ring the night before. It was Ida who had made it, and when I had called her to thank her she had invited me over so she could see for herself how it looked on my hand.
Did it trouble me that the same hand that bore that ring had explored the contours of another man’s face just a few nights earlier? It did, but I had constructed several rationales for the power of the attraction I had felt for David, most of them relating to the past that I was hoping to leave behind. And I had little doubt that I was moving towards a happy future by marrying Reuben. Still, when Ida took my janus-faced hand in hers, I wondered how she could not feel the treachorous heat of its fingertips and palm as she admired the cool beauty of the diamond that sat so nicely on its back. She didn’t seem to. She nodded her satisfaction, then gestured me towards the living room and told me to wait there while she made tea.
Ida had lived in that apartment for most of my life—its spacious size and decor reflecting the improvement in her economic position since the end of the war—but only one other time had she received me in her living room, that weekend of my family’s move to Côte-St-Luc, years earlier.
“Remember when I spent the weekend with you?” I asked her now as she joined me in the living room.
“Of course I remember.” She put the tray down on the coffee table by the sofa. “You were such a peculiar little thing. Cleaning your plate no matter how often I filled it—I was worried maybe you had tapeworm—and thanking me every three minutes for every little thing. And then patting your clothes as if they were your pets.”
She didn’t mention my peeing my pants, which I appreciated.
The tea set was the same one she had used then, and she placed a slice of lemon in her own cup as she had that afternoon, but instead of stirring raspberry preserves into mine she added the amber fluid from the smaller of the silver pots on the tray.
“You’ve graduated,” she said as I inhaled the whisky-scented steam rising from my cup. She spiked her own cup, then raised it to toast “L’chaim.”
I returned her l’chaim, raising my cup to her.
“So …” she said. We spent very little time together, just the two of us; with the inspection of the ring now complete, she was scrambling for something to say to me. “The plans for the wedding are coming along?”
I assured her they were.
She nodded, smiled.
I reached into my satchel and retrieved the notebook I had brought with me. Ida looked at it, then at me. “Remember you once told me you’d read it to me when I was engaged to be married?”
I expected her to put me off again, but she didn’t. Had enough time finally passed for her? Did she have some reason of her own to want to read through it again? Had she always intended to read it to me when she thought I was old enough to understand the feelings it raised for her? She reached for the notebook, put on her reading glasses and opened it.
“I begin with a dream …” she read, and a scene formed in my mind of a stone city from which the entire range of human emotion had been cleansed except for terror, and from which every colour had been drained except for the grey of the streets and the blackish red of the fluid that filled the hollows where rainwater had once pooled. I saw a terrified girl running through the maze of streets and coming to a door that blocked her flight. I saw her falling against the door, pleading with it as if it held some residue of mercy in its fibres, and then the miraculous opening: into colour, sunlight, the scent of apricots, the tinkling notes of a piano.
“That was my childhood home,” Ida said. “Lily’s aunt Lottie was my mother. She doesn’t refer to my father because she never knew him. He was her father’s oldest brother, but he died when she was a baby. His name was Herschel—I named Elka after him.” And to my expression of confusion: “Hersch means ‘deer’ in Yiddish. Elk.” She smiled. “It was another thing for her to hate me for when she was a child.”
“Elka didn’t like her name?”
“She would have preferred Elizabeth.” Ida shook her head. “Lily and her family lived in Antwerp—her father was my uncle Chaim.” She looked at me.
I nodded, already knew that.
“She and her mother would visit my family in Krakow every summer. The visits continued even after my father died and my mother remarried—there was a deep bond of friendship between my mother and her mother, and it endured and deepened even when they were no longer sisters-in-law. Lily’s mother still had her own family in Krakow to visit as well, but they would stay with my mother. Every summer. They would leave Antwerp in June and not return until September. And I would watch them go, my aunt and my spoiled little cousin, to my home, my family. While I had to stay and work like a servant for her father.”
“Why was your uncle Chaim in Antwerp if the rest of the family was in Poland?”
“Antwerp was the centre of the diamond trade. A lot of people moved there. My own father had wanted to move there, but he was the eldest, he couldn’t leave. And he might not have been able to leave even had he been the youngest, like Chaim. He had more vision than strength, my father—he could see what should be done without being able to do it.”
She picked up the notebook. “Who am I?” she read. “A mound of mud in an autumn field. A pile of leaves to the side of a forest path. In your cities I’m a rat scurrying beneath the surface of your life. I hide in your sewers. I infect your dreams with pestilence. Vermin, you call me. Cur. Once I was a girl.”
“She always had tendencies towards the dramatic,” Ida said, peering at me over the top of her reading glasses. “She went through a stage of wanting to be an actress. The Sarah Bernhardt of her generation. But at thirteen she was overcome with shyness. You could see it descending on her, my sister Sonya wrote me.” I saw a tight-fitting dress inching down the length of a girl’s body, a sheath of shyness binding her in. “But beneath it she was still the same as before. Full of herself. So I guess she decided then that she would become a writer, a fantasy that her parents encouraged just as they had encouraged every other whim that came into her head, bowing and scraping before her—she was their youngest and their only girl. Their little princess. And all the while I was working twelve-hour days in her father’s workshop, providing the materials of life that allowed her to entertain her fantasies in comfort. Including this, I might add.” She held up the notebook itself, which had probably been an expensive purchase, I realized, though one made long after Ida had already departed for Montreal.
Ida read a bit further then about a meeting the girl had had with a being who was either a man or a figment of her imagination: “A crack had appeared in the Polish day, a drawing back of the world along a ragged seam. I narrowed my eyes to make it out, this parting in the shape of him, this opening to someplace else. Get up, he said. Quick.”
“Do you think she was really hiding in a pile of leaves?” I asked.
“More likely it was some sort of dugout. It wasn’t a chance meeting she was describing. He was a smuggler. He was going to smuggle her across a river—I’m not sure which river, and I don’t know why. I don’t even know where the border was at that point in the war. The lair she was hiding in was probably a pre-arranged point of rendezvous.”
“A smuggler? You mean for payment?”
“Of course for payment.”
I thought about the segment she had just
read to me. “If she hadn’t lived to write about it, you’d think it was the angel of death she had just met, not a man.”
She peered at me again over her glasses. “She didn’t live long.” She picked up the notebook. “Who are you? he asked. I had been walking for days. I’m a walking graveyard, I told him. The dead are buried in my skin …” Ida’s voice was strong, but her hands were trembling, I noticed. Just a little, but it made me as uneasy as if the earth beneath me was trembling just a little. “Hours passed. Days, I think. His eyes were black but they reflected light. My face emerged, revealed itself to him.”
“So you see,” Ida said.
See what? I wondered.
She read on. “My father worked with light, I told him. He captured light with stones. He bent broken light into beauty …”
Her writing in that passage reminded me of some of the poems I had written in high school when I fell for Charles Blumenthal, the efforts I had made to try to elevate the boring details of my life into something more interesting, something that might match the intensity of the feelings I had for him.
“And on my mother’s side I descend from kindness …” This was a reference to the girl’s maternal grandfather. “He was a man so kind that migrating birds came to rest on his shoulders,” Ida read, and a vision formed in my mind of a man standing on the edge of a field with exhausted geese resting on his shoulders.
“Wouldn’t they be heavy?” I asked.
“What, heavy?”
“The geese,” I said, thinking about the Canada geese that migrated every spring and fall, imagining how terrifying it would be to have one fly in for a landing on my shoulder.
“Who said anything about geese? It was songbirds. Tiny songbirds, scores of them, all along his shoulders and arms.”
“Like a tree,” I commented, and she looked at me as if I had said something right.
“There was something wrong with her grandfather,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“In his head. That’s why Lily and her mother stayed with us. It was like he’d gone senile, except that he was too young for that. His mind and personality just dissolved. First memory, then reason, then language, then appetite of any sort.”
The Imposter Bride Page 24