Borderline

by Janette Turner Hospital

“I’ll explain when I get there. See you.”

  She waited several minutes after ringing his doorbell and then rang once more. “I fell asleep again,” he apologized. “I wasn’t sure if you’d really called or if it was part of my dream.”

  They hugged, and she said contritely: “I shouldn’t have, at such a barbaric hour.”

  “Nonsense. I’m always happy to see you. Whenever.” He yawned and rubbed his eyes.

  (When she calls from wherever it is she’s gone, it will be just the same as that night. It will be at some wretched hour and I’ll be weak with relief.

  “This is an all-time record of non-contact,” I’ll say. “I was beginning to think you’d disappeared for good.”

  And she’ll say contritely:“ I’m sorry, Jean-Marc. I got sidetracked by something a bit bizarre. I’m in a phone box a few blocks south of Mexico. Can I drop by in twenty minutes or so?”).

  Jean-Marc rubbed his eyes again, in case it was just a wish in full bloom. “Coffee?” he asked.

  “Thanks. You look haggard.”

  “School-board pianos; had to work late. Gave me a lot of trouble.”

  “I called a couple of hours ago from L’Ascension. Thought you must have been out with a girl.”

  He leaned against the door to his kitchen, watching her. She was never still. She was moving along his bookshelves, absorbed by his recent acquisitions. She doesn’t want to know, he thought. She refuses to know. And he himself had hopes of outgrowing his obsession.

  (“They all look like your stepmother,” the Old Volcano laughed. “What’s the matter with your imagination? Can’t you stand on your own two feet?”

  At least, I could have told him, I don’t chew them up and spit them out. I keep to civilized rules.

  Oh well, I imagine him telling all and sundry, he may be a piano tuner, but at least he’s not gay.)

  “Oh your books, Jean-Marc,” she said. “They’re taking over the house.”

  (It’s true. A modest obsession: to recreate on a private scale the library at Alexandria. Pianos and books, what else do I have?)

  Felicity’s breathing began to grow more regular. She sat in his armchair and closed her eyes, inhaling deeply. “Oh I knew I’d feel better once I saw you. It’s so calm in your house, Jean-Marc.”

  “So what’s the trouble?” he asked. “Is it him?”

  “No, no. Nothing to do with him.”

  “He hasn’t been exposing himself in public? Or crying on your shoulder because his latest student nymph ran away with the printmaker? No vulgar volcanic eruptions?”

  “Jean-Marc,” she said gently. “Don’t be so harsh. You keep trying to invent a monster. It’s your only imperfection.” She stroked his arm and for a moment he kept still and held his breath, but then turned into the kitchen and busied himself with the making of coffee.

  “You’ve seen him then?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “Not for a couple of months. I dropped in on his latest show when I was in New York, and he happened to be there.”

  “Happened to be there.” Jean-Marc laughed, and the coffee mugs turned restive in his hands. A brown comment seeped into his carpet. Felicity was looking at his books again and said soothingly, “He seemed very … serene. He said —”

  “Oh, serene!”

  “He said he’d been hoping you’d come down for the opening, that he’d sent an invitation.”

  “Fliss, I know perfectly well who sent me the invitation.”

  “I did not!” She turned from his books. “He asked how you were. He said he wished —”

  “Liar.” But he said it fondly, handing her a mug of coffee. He remembered the day she had found him sobbing in the woods near L’Ascension. He had run away. He was never going back. And she had simply held him until he was too exhausted to pound her with his fists anymore. He was still a child then.

  Felicity sighed. “Oh well.” She made a resigned gesture with her hands and shrugged. “Fathers. They’re bound to disappoint. I’m sure if you’d only visit —”

  “I prefer to keep the border between us, as an outward and visible sign. Anyway, enough of the Old Volcano. What is upsetting you?”

  “Ah.” She took a slow mouthful of coffee. “It’s going away. Perhaps I shouldn’t talk about it in case she jumps out of the words.”

  “Oh Fliss, not another stray. It took me months to get that so-called jazz pianist off my doorstep. He didn’t want work, he was a junkie. He stole three rolls of my best piano wire.”

  (The truth is, from the age of eighteen, I’ve always felt it was me looking after Felicity. She’s not anchored to everyday, she floats away. Her days are baroque, they curl into each other like acanthus leaves, she lives somewhere between now and then. She moves in and out of her life.

  She picks up people — men especially — through sheer inattentiveness. I’ve watched it happen. There must be something magnetic about her total indifference. Strays adhere to her like lint.)

  “I know, I know,” she said. “You won’t have to get involved this time, Jean-Marc. I tried not to get involved myself. You talk as though I go looking for complications, but I try to avoid them. I have avoided this one. I’m avoiding her now. Which is rotten of me.”

  “You’re hopeless.” She always made him feel lighthearted, as though she had arrived with clowns and balloons. “You can’t turn anyone down. Your sympathies are totally cockeyed.” From his father on down.

  “No, really, Jean-Marc, anyone would have done this. It was instinctive. In fact, someone else did do it. I have his card.” She began rummaging through the large, worn leather sack (a weird and exotic thing, talismanic, a relic from childhood) that served as briefcase and handbag. Only art curators, he thought, who are permitted eccentricities, could get away with such a carryall. “I know it’s somewhere here,” she said vaguely.

  He grinned. She would forget what she was looking for before she found it. He stirred his coffee vigorously to stop himself from brushing the hair out of her eyes as she sorted through muddled and magic contents.

  “Okay,” he said. “So who’s in the cottage this time?”

  “Well, no one at the moment, that’s the problem. There was a woman … at least, I think … Do you remember Perugino’s Magdalena?”

  She had that distant look in her eyes, the one he associated with his father’s studio in New York. He had dropped in unexpectedly once. Canvases stacked all over the place, the loft like a fully rigged ship sailing into an exhibition. He went exploring through tropical islands inhabited only by her eyes. Acrylic jungles on Masonite. Passionflowers six feet across. He sailed past brilliant matted vines through which her lopsided eyes glowed like a tiger’s. Post-abstractionist symbolism was what critics were calling his father’s stuff then. (For sheer idiocy and irrelevance, he still found it hard to choose between art critics and music critics. He pictured them as frantic little men, ramming the gloriously nonverbal into grinders to come out as words. Mincemeat intelligence. “I like to send them scurrying for new labels,” his father laughed, “and then, once they’ve stuck on a new one, I like to confound’em. It’s my duty. I keep them in business.”) Jean-Marc sailed on between monsoons and coral reefs where her underwater eyes swam at him from seaweed taller than himself. Queensland surf licked at his ankles, he could hear the sun. Bellbirds called from Brisbane gullies. He slipped round a study of eyes and crows that was big as a mainsail — and there was Felicity sprawling naked on a sofa while his father painted her.

  He had felt embarrassed, bewitched, awkward, angry (he was sixteen at the time), but neither of them seemed in the least aware of his intrusion. Felicity had a glazed look in her eyes. He remembered thinking she had gone off somewhere else and left her body behind to take care of the boring business of a sitting. He simply stood there transfixed, half hidden behind the redoubt of stacked canvases, until his father turned and saw him. Confusion. A forest fire in his cheeks. And then the Old Volcano erupting into roars of laughter at the embarras
sing evidence of his son’s adolescent excitement.

  Whenever he saw that abstracted look — that studio vacancy — in her eyes, he was swamped with a muddle of desire and of murderous rage toward his father.

  She was talking in her faraway voice. Something about a refrigerated truck. He blinked and struggled to attend.

  “I’ve been reading about this, Jean-Marc, I’ve got clippings in my file. Death squads, corruption, it’s a nightmare. The ones who are sent back disappear or are killed, there’s evidence —”

  “I wish you wouldn’t keep that file. It’s morbid.”

  He felt an impulse to pound the persistence out of her, as he had done in the woods of his childhood, though it wouldn’t have any effect, it wouldn’t discourage her, “because when I was ten,” she said then, “just like you, I stood all by myself on a beach at the edge of the world and screamed at the sea.”

  When he visualized this, he saw her in miniature, a child with wispy golden hair and her bizarre leather bag over her shoulder trailing in the sand. He imagined the snake boats with prows like cobras craning their scaly necks to peer at her, a child waiting forever at the crinkled edge of an empty ocean.

  “It’s ironies I keep on file,” she was saying. “It’s irony I collect. You have to be fleeing an approved dictatorship before you count as a refugee. It has to be the right kind of suffering. Jean-Marc, are you listening to me?”

  He jerked himself away from the beach at the end of the world.

  “Fliss, I never know when to take you …”

  “Look, here it is. I knew I had it somewhere in here. The card of this man who sells insurance. That should convince you.”

  “Convince me …?” he echoed in bemusement. “The man who sells insurance?”

  “You haven’t been listening,” she reproached. And she told it all again while he tried to follow. “The priest thinks I’m crazy,” she said. “He thinks I invented her, but he did see the blood on the bed, so I don’t know what …” Like a sleuth, he was listening for the subtext.

  “What about Aaron?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Isn’t that his name? The one with the wife and two daughters, the businessman with refinement.” He was not quite able to keep the razor-blade edge from his voice.

  “Oh,” she said. “Aaron. That’s over.”

  “Again?”

  (And naturally I deduced that was the real reason behind all this fluster. Why wouldn’t I? How could I possibly have separated all the talk of La Magdalena from a dream or a typical thought on the wing? I know Felicity. You have to get under the skin of her reasons.)

  She was looking at her watch and riffling through his books. She could never be calm when sitting still. “Do you think it’s too early to call him?” she asked.

  “Call who?”

  “The insurance guy. Augustine Kelly.”

  “Why do you want to call him? I thought you …”

  “Because I didn’t anticipate the … And then there’s the blood. Suppose the priest subsequently …? I think it’s only fair to let him know, in case there are complications.”

  Jean-Marc laughed. “Your mind works like a switchback ride through a hall of mirrors. It’s impossible to keep up.”

  “Do you think it’s too early to call?”

  “At three in the morning? Are you serious?”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  She was moving along his bookcases again, taking down books as though she planned to cram for a morning exam. It surprised him that the Old Volcano had not painted her as a woman sleepwalking on water through the middle of a howling gale.

  “Do you suppose,” he said fondly, “that we could snatch a few hours’ sleep?”

  She rubbed her cheek against his hair. “You sleep. I’m too wound up. I’ll read for a while.”

  He leaned into her embrace for a dangerous minute then pulled away. (As a patient leaves an anaesthetic, tempted by the narcotic, knowing it is necessary to resist.) When he stood, he was considerably taller than she. This helped him. He breathed deeply, inhaling detachment. He was troubled by her translucent flush, by the unnatural brightness of her eyes. He asked, with an almost entirely clinical concern, as though gathering data on a piano that needed attention: “How much sleep are you getting? On the average?”

  She raised her eyebrows, surprised, perplexed. “I don’t really know. I don’t keep track. I suppose as much as I need. It’s always hectic getting ready for a new exhibition.”

  If he had known that was the next to last time he would see her, he would have smashed his tuning forks and burned his library rather than fall asleep. He would have woken himself up properly when he heard her — or dreamed he heard her — on the telephone at an hour when birds were barely stirring. There were fragments he thought he remembered — her hair tumbling over him, the kiss on his forehead, a bemused comment: “His wife answered, and hung up on me. At least I guess it was his wife. Now why would she do that?”

  “At six on a Saturday morning,” he mumbled. “Why wouldn’t she?”

  “Oh dear,” she said. “Is it Saturday?”

  In his dream she was swept away on a fishing boat that flew.

  If there was any night in his life he wanted to have over, it was that one.

  When he woke in the middle of the morning, she was gone.

  14

  A blood spot in the yolk disturbed him. Gus watched the egg as it skated about the pan, spitting butter, and felt an unpleasant heaving along certain internal muscles. Nevertheless, he would be unable to throw the egg out. He thought of it as live. Eating it would be a solemn and chastening duty, a sort of memento mori, like receiving the Host at Mass.

  There was a note on the refrigerator door, appended to it by a butterfly with flaring black-tipped orange wings and a magnetized belly.

  Have taken Sylvie and Jeanne to their figure-skating lessons. Tina is playing in the Dicksons’ basement with Peggy. Kathleen is allowed to sleep in, but don’t let her sleep too long. She has to help Sister O’Sullivan with the altar flowers at 11. Vic’s Hardware called, the lawn mower is fixed.

  He read a multitude of reproaches in these lines. With a sigh he flipped the eggs over, swallowed back an urge to be sick as the blood spot was seared by hot butter, and went over to the kitchen window. Sunlight greeted him like a dagger between the eyes. He leaned against the window moulding, eyes closed, and asked himself how it was that he never remembered about hangovers while he was drinking. He counted to ten then squinted at his lawn. Dandelions spattered its surface and slid around in the sun like egg yolks. He felt sick again and had to close his eyes. A mathematical problem absorbed him: if weeds grew twice as fast as grass, and if there were three times as many broadleafed undesirables as there were blades of good Kentucky bluegrass, and if he had mowed this lawn 1,437 times in the last decade, how many transgressions did it take …? The problem was too difficult to formulate. And why was it that uncut grass did not grow at a uniform rate? Why was it so tufted with hummocks and valleys, a shaggy terrain that humped itself into the wind? Swaying. Running in wavelets toward the house. Oppressing him.

  He sighed, poured coffee, and slid the fried egg greasily onto toast. Its blood spot, like a devil’s eye, watched him. As he ate, he could feel his throat muscles flinch from the close observation, one by one. In the beginning of all things, he thought, is a blood clot. This was the starting point. He must have been eating the heart of a chicken-to-be. He monitored its descent down interior tunnels until it splashed into some lake behind his navel. There was actually a sound similar to small waves breaking over rocks. The coffee, he supposed; a lake that heaved uneasily, brewing inner storms. He ate some dry toast.

  In a loose way, he believed in signs and portents. Blood meant that harm had been done. There was a need for expiation. For various reasons yesterday and last night did not bear close scrutiny; but reparations, he knew, were called for.

  He ignored his queasiness, he turned r
esolutely away from a craving to crawl back into bed, he set his course bravely, tacking into the day. He washed his few dishes. The stove top was noticeably speckled with brown flecks of butter, so he rubbed it with the wet dishcloth. To his dismay, a film of dullness spread itself in the wake of the cloth like a blight. He squeezed the cloth out, held it under cold running water, and tried again. No improvement. The stove top made him think of a marsh, motionless beneath its opaque grey skin. He acknowledged defeat and went to see if Kathleen was awake yet.

  As soon as he entered her room he had a sharp and profoundly disturbing sense of déjà vu. A dream came back to him: long hair across a pillow, a woman on a bed.

  But he could pull nothing specific from the fog at the back of his mind. Or did not want to. There had been a woman in a New York hotel room. He did not want to remember that. And then another one somewhere else, he did not want to remember that either. He had won a trip to New York, there had been a successful sales conference, he had drunk the usual conference amount (far too much), he had come away with a pocketful of magic formulae, he had managed to drive home without getting himself killed. And hadn’t there been some muddle-up or other at the border? He was hung over, he had slept in, his wife was upset or angry or both, and no doubt for good reason.

  Full of untarnished possibilities, his eldest daughter (his second-born) drew her sweet sleeping breaths. A slow and untroubled sighing. Yet the sweetness was not after all absolute; a slightly sour morning smell reached his nostrils and he felt saddened — as when a hearse passes on a fine summer’s day. An intimation of mortality. He thought of his first-born asleep beneath the stone marker, and crossed himself. A comforting gesture. He did it again, to exorcise the dreams, and felt better.

  Kathleen, her long hair drifting across cotton percale forgetme-nots, was watched over by a jostling crowd of young men in various poster poses: shirts open, silver medals nestling in chest hairs, jeans tight in an apparent advertisement for gender. Keep smiling, the young men had scrawled across their thighs. Some had written: To all my fans, with love. And one, larger than life, his protuberances chiselled into high-relief denim, had actually written: To Kathleen, with all my love, Johnny. This intimate greeting had cost Kathleen — or, in point of fact, her father — fifteen dollars and a large self-addressed stamped envelope; for which Johnny and his manly attachments (though scored with a gridwork of fold lines) looked soulfully grateful.