Borderline

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Kathleen stirred and turned over and the gallery of young men, rank upon rank of guardian angels, fluttered and stirred with her. Gus tolerated them, skewered as they were to the wall by their upper corners, decently restrained, and certainly preferable to the ones who left bicycles lying in his driveway. When he leaned on his car horn, the latter stared at him with faint insolence as they shifted their bikes. They moved with a slow, casual arrogance, and he considered the cut of their jeans pornographic. It was intolerable to think of those acne-faced boys, with their unwholesome hands, touching Kathleen. He certainly hoped that Therese had explained what was what to the girls, though when he thought back to the awful innocence of Therese at eighteen, he felt extremely uneasy. On the other hand, she knew only too well the penalties for naiveté.

  How fearful and astonishing to have arrived at this place: to have a daughter who was sixteen and beautiful, an arranger of altar flowers, a collector of glossy pinup sex and innocuous sleaze. Like all philanderers, he wanted to shield his daughters from men. The fragility of their innocence caused him anguish. Sometimes when he was watching the Sunday afternoon game, Kathleen would bring him a beer and would rumple his hair and give him a quick, furtive kiss on the back of his neck. At such times he would have to read the TV Guide with great concentration, holding it close to his face because of the small print.

  Very quietly he tiptoed from her room. He could not bring himself to propel her, justyet, into the day’s quota of imperfections. Let her sleep and dream on.

  There was the lawn mower to be picked up, and then he would stop by the florist’s for the peace offering. Carnations for Therese, pink and white. These were her colours, the soft pastels, pale as the faces of martyrs. Insipid, perhaps. But he brushed this thought aside quickly and guiltily because — like a small dark spider — it had fallen into his mind from out of nowhere.

  At Vic’s Hardware he saw a man whose uninsured condition was a source of concern even on a Saturday morning.

  “Hal!” he said. “How’re things?”

  “Fine, just fine! Good to see you, Gus.”

  “How’s Sally?”

  “Great, just great. And Therese?”

  “Couldn’t be better. And your little one?”

  “Peggy. Just as cute as a button,” said Hal, beaming. “Apple of my eye.”

  “Sure makes me lose sleep when I think how you haven’t, you know, provided …” — Gus hesitated tactfully — “if anything should happen.”

  Hal laughed. “Now don’t start that again, Gus. I plan to dance on my hundredth birthday. Got no plans to leave them in the lurch.”

  Gus, truly unable to comprehend a lack of anxiety about one’s family, shook his head lugubriously. “Not the sort of gamble I’d take for my wife and kids. But it takes all kinds, I guess.”

  Hal, counting out lengths of copper piping, missed a beat. He ran his hands along the slender cylinders, seemed to be pondering the idiosyncrasies of his bathroom, and then said: “Okay, you win. Figure out something that won’t cost me more than ten or fifteen a month, and drop over next week.”

  This was the method that had won Gus the trip to New York. He was something of a phenomenon in his company. He had the peculiar distinction of bringing in the largest number of sales, yet one of the smallest incomes, of any agent in the province. The finer points of fiscal analysis and persuasion eluded him, but he was a believer. Protecting the family: it was quite simply one of those things — like standing for the national anthem or helping old ladies across the street — that any decent man did. When his branch manager was being kind about the low dollar volume of Gus’s business, he called Gus “our knight in shining armour” or “our guardian of the little people, who need it most, heaven knows!” At other times, he said, “For God’s sake, Gus, think bigger. Think rich.”

  What Gus needed, his manager believed, was some old-timerevival sales pep; to brush pinstripes with Million Dollar Round Table types. He hoped a razzle-dazzle convention would do the trick. Think success, he told Gus when he handed him the hotel reservation for New York.

  Gus was thinking success at the florist’s, visualizing good outcomes, waiting confidently for the magic. The florist’s was one of his favourite places. It reminded him of a travel agent’s poster of Tahiti. Begonias mobbed him, African violets lifted up their purple skirts, gardenias lay fragrantly at his feet. Therese came toward him, languid between the potted chrysanthemums and the Boston ferns, her hair streaming over her bare shoulders and breasts. She was wearing nothing but a flower behind one ear.

  Beside a lagoon, in soft sea grasses, she lay down and he covered her with the carnations, one by one. I don’t know why the other women have happened, he told her. They just crop up from time to time like dandelions. I never give them carnations.

  It doesn’t matter, she said. I know they mean nothing. They have nothing to do with us.

  Pink and white convolutions of petals, a voluptuous blanket, almost hid her. Only the tips of her nipples were showing. He kissed each one and murmured fondly: It’s so long since I’ve seen them. You never take your nightgown off in bed.

  Oh, murmured Therese, moving liquidly to accommodate him. The carnations! And it’s so warm here, so warm.

  He began to peel off his clothing.

  “Can I help you?” The voice came sighing between the grasses. “It is warm, but we have to keep hothouse conditions.”

  Gus peered through ficus benjaminas, a humid forest of them, to where a maiden tossed her long brown hair and smiled. Her eyes were full of leaf shadows.

  “Can I help you?” she asked again. Her lips were very close to him and smelled like petals. “We have roses on special. And also the potted mums.”

  “Carnations,” he said bemused. “I had carnations in mind. They’re more —”

  “Oh yes. I quite agree.” He could smell her gardenia skin. “This way, sir.”

  He followed, bewitched, through forest paths. She scattered blessings as she went, pausing to encourage the crotons, to cull an imperfect leaf or two from geraniums and Swedish ivies. Dracaena marginata waylaid her, she dallied over the gloxinias, the movement of her hips was miraculous. Gus gave thanks for the natural world.

  She was wearing a clinging white knitted shift embroidered in royal blue across her breasts. Jill’s Flowers. The letters moved like a field of bluebells as she breathed. Philodendrons, gawking from their overhead baskets, brushed her thighs with their trailing and variegated tendrils. Gus also was tempted to touch.

  “Help yourself,” the wood nymph offered. She indicated plastic tubs of carnations, an extravaganza of fluted petals. She bent over them and her buttocks moved inside her shift as silkily as tulip bulbs through spring soil. He bent over beside her, his cheek almost touching hers.

  “Are you Jill?” he asked.

  “Not the Jill. She’s my aunt.” She was selecting blooms, red and pink and white, their long stalks glistening wetly as she lifted them out of their buckets. “But my name’s Jillian too.” She proffered her samples. “Do you like the red ones? They’re my favourites.”

  He was mesmerized by the pulse in the hollow of her neck. Fragility always overwhelmed him.

  She seemed slightly and charmingly nervous. “Don’t you want to help pick them out yourself? Men usually do.”

  He took the red carnation from her hand and touched its flower to the dimple in her neck. As though dubbing her a Lady of the Realm or conferring magic. Her dimple throbbed delicately. “The red’s for you,” he said. “Since it’s your favourite.” He tucked it behind her ear.

  She blushed furiously, and he wanted to drag her behind the begonias, down to the Tahitian lagoon. As she turned her head away, bending over the carnation tubs for safety, the long stalk of her ear ornament bounced across her shoulder blades like a kite tail and she took refuge in laughter, becoming arch and flirtatious.

  “You’ll get me in trouble,” she said, looking through her lashes. “Your wife will be in here returning
the flowers.”

  “How did you know they were for my wife?”

  “I can always tell. We’re experts on men as well as flowers.”

  “Ah.” He was disconcerted. Perhaps they assigned grades, depending on the kind of flowers ordered. He wondered how he measured up.

  She said teasingly: “It’s carnation-picking time.”

  He turned to the business of choosing whites and pinks with her help. Sometimes their arms brushed, a delectable accident. Fumbling for stems, his hand skirmished with hers underwater. Once he dropped a flower and as he stooped to pick it up, the back of his forearm came into fleeting contact with her thigh.

  She said: “You’ll want greenery with these. It’s out back in the storage room, if you’d like to help choose …”

  He kissed her, out back, by the glass-doored refrigerators in which chilly roses bloomed by the bucketful. In the presence of orchids, they touched various parts of each other. These things happen under hothouse conditions. Someone, a shrill and impatient customer, rang the counter bell in the front of the shop. Such is life.

  “Perhaps,” Gus said, flustered, “we could meet for a drink some time. Later today, maybe? Or next week?”

  “Wait here. I’ll be back.”

  He was left with the bridal arrangements and corsages-to-go. Wreaths of lilies tied with black ribbons were reproachful. Therese’s face appeared inside a circle of sad laurel. Therese! he said. Wait! I can explain. I’m bringing flowers. But it was not Therese. It was a woman in a torn black dress. He was startled. She seemed to belong in a dream. She seemed to be someone he once knew but could not quite place. She moved behind a wedding bouquet. Jillians come and Jillians go, she sang in her black bride’s voice, but who can keep count of your betrayals?

  Who can keep count? sang Therese of the wreaths.

  Bunches of baby’s breath joined in choral accusation, there was a swelling chorus of asparagus fern, judgmental.

  I am a clown, Gus confessed. And a lecher.

  He gathered up his sad carnations, left the requisite money, and fled through the tradesmen’s entrance into the back parking lot.

  Therese accepted the flowers graciously, as clear evidence of guilt. Resignation suited her. She wore it well, like a dress that has become threadbare but is still comfortable and attractive. She had the air of someone who carries on by instinct in the face of exhaustion and predictable humiliations.

  “Thank you for mowing the lawn,” she said quietly. And then: “Sister O’Sullivan called to see if Kathleen was sick.” Though Therese had never mastered the pronunciation of the English th, her absent h’s were expressive. T’ank you. Kat’leen. It was unbearably plaintive.

  “I’m sorry,” Gus sighed. “I couldn’t bear to disturb her. I thought she’d wake in time.”

  “That’s okay, daddy,” Kathleen said brightly. “I hate doing the flowers with Sister O’Sullivan. She asks a million nosy questions. She thinks all of us girls are sex maniacs.”

  “Kat’leen!” Therese’s voice was shocked but weary. She knew the worst would always happen. “Please to tidy your room.”

  When the children had left the lunch table, she said neutrally: “Your phone call early this morning. It was the woman.” (T’is morning. T’woman.)

  Gus, innocent, raised a puzzled eyebrow. “What woman?”

  You know, her turned back said.

  He was frowning, summoning up business contacts. “What did she want?”

  Therese made furrows in the sugar bowl. “She would not say.”

  Gus felt a momentary panic but could think of no sins likely to announce themselves in this way.“Must be one of the secretaries. Something must have come up with a client while I was away. Or else they wanted to check that I was back.”

  “It was not a secretary. The woman has said she is calling from Montreal.”

  “Montreal?”

  After seconds of total blankness, Gus remembered the dream in full clarity. And then that it had not been a dream. He remembered the woman who had something to do with art galleries, the delays at the border, the torn black dress. The crime.

  “My God,” he said. “What did she say?”

  “She has not left any message.” Having stated her case, Therese would press charges no further. She knew how to suffer.

  “Oh for God’s sake, Therese,” he said. “It’s not what you think.” A rare innocence made him angry. “It’s not in the least what you think.” He was on a crescendo now, energized by the absence of guilt and by anxiety. “I need to know every detail. Could it possibly have been the police?”

  Therese blanched. “The police?”

  “What did she sound like? Did she have a Boston accent?”

  “I … I don’t know.” Therese was shaken.

  “What number did she leave?”

  “No … no number. She … hung up the phone.”

  “She hung up?”

  Therese was not a good liar. A rash of guilt spotted her cheeks. Gus decided on a strategy of wounded silence, but there was something acrid in his mouth, the taste of fear. There must have been trouble with the police. Fountains welled from his underarms; his shirt drooped against him like a wet sail. Felicity — that was the woman’s name. He had her card somewhere. Therese watched in alarm as he rummaged through his suit pockets, turned his briefcase inside out.

  He found Felicity’s business card.

  There was a Boston address and a Boston number, but pencilled on the back were some digits with a Montreal area code. He dialled from the hallway phone, the Montreal number. He let it ring twenty times. He could not believe she would not answer. Immediately, he dialled again. No answer.

  Therese, alert to new disasters, watched him wild-eyed. “Qu’estce qui arrive?” she faltered.

  If he had not been so worried, he might have enjoyed being the wronged one. He understood, suddenly, why it was addictive; why withholding forgiveness was irresistible. He said tersely, turning the knife: “If there’s a call, I’ll be in the driveway. Working on the rust holes in your car.”

  As he assembled the sanding blocks, the acrylic filler, and the primer, his motions were heavy with virtue. For months he had been promising to do this, putting it off. He had thought of it as a tedious job, but now he wondered why. There was something restful, sensuous even, about stroking the metal with the sanding block, banishing ugliness. Scrape, scrape, scrape. He blew ferrous particles from the block and watched them float away between the pines in dark, rosy puffs. He tested the sanded edges of a hole. They were freshly silver, the colour of a soul after penance.

  Stroke and lift. He fell into a comfortable rhythm. A film of brownish red, luminous in the sunlight, dusted his arms. He might have been a tarnished priest bending to obscure rites of purification. He blew himself clean.

  After all, he thought, as hole after hole was scrubbed immaculate, I did nothing wrong. If the police come, I will tell them the truth. The woman looked pitiful, not quite human. Anyone would have helped her. I did it without thinking. If I stood on a dock and saw a child fall in, I wouldn’t stop to remember that I can’t swim, I would just dive in. And then afterwards, Your Honour, when we realized we had broken the law, we turned her in. We did the right thing.

  The right thing. This thought assaulted him in a sudden cloudy funnel of rufous filings. He was almost choked. Have mercy upon us, sang every laceration in the metal. Do not abandon us. The torn black dress flapped like a mad thing in the summer wind. It wrapped itself around his face, it shrieked in his ears. His nerves were in a panic.

  Something has happened to her, he knew. To La Magdalena.

  I betrayed her.

  They are sending her back to … to whatever it was she was fleeing from.

  He knew only this: it was apparently worse than slow death by refrigeration.

  He had difficulty breathing. A coughing fit took possession of him. Metal filings were clogging up his lungs. He felt that if Felicity did not answer his next call, it w
ould become completely impossible to breathe. But he could not call her. He was afraid to find out what had happened.

  With renewed frenzy, he plunged at the rust. He was the man that ate the corruption that ate the car that Therese drove. The savage scouring calmed him, his breath cleared a passage through the dust.

  “Daddy?” Kathleen said. “Can I help?”

  From the convulsive way he turned, she might have been a policeman or an immigration officer. He stared at her with a blank dread. It was impossible, impossible, to untangle right and wrong. Existence was rust-riddled beyond repair, a pockwork of errors. He moved, he did harm: that was an axiom.

  “I’m sorry, daddy. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “No, no,” he said distractedly.

  “Can I start on the other side?”

  In tandem, they scraped at the metal. It was some solace for Gus to think of the car as his life. He furrowed his own back, concentrating on the pockets of rottenness. The clamour of his muscles filled up the space of his mind, there was no room for thought. The pain began to be seductive, a comfortable self-flagellation.

  “Daddy,” Kathleen said, “can I ask you something?”

  Her voice came in rhythmic fragments, punctuated by dust. Gus went on scouring the right foreleg of the car, biting deep into the flesh.

  “Will you promise me not to get angry?” Kathleen asked.

  One, two, three, and return to the start of the stroke. He had given himself over to the beat of it now, a mindless pleasure.

  “Daddy, I’m not asking this just to be … I mean, it’s not because I believe it. When Jonathan Springer told me — he said it in front of a whole group of my friends — I was so angry I ripped up his math homework. I said he was a filthy liar. But then … but then, some of the kids looked away as though …”