“Cold, eh?” she says, passing me.
“Yeah.”
We lock into a dance of our own, wordless, arms weighted then empty, weighted then empty, faster each time as we unload the car.
“Jesus, you look like Alice Cooper,” she says, dropping the final bag into the front hallway. “You’ve got, like, mascara down to your chin. Come in and dry off. Have a glass of wine with me. My sister has some good shit.”
“I can’t.” I back away, using my sleeve to wipe tears that look like rain. “Gotta work tonight, right?”
“Oh. Yeah, sure. Almost forgot. Well, thanks, Bea. I really appreciate this.”
“Yeah, no problem!” I call out, and hurry back to my car. She stays on the porch watching me, the way you do when you want to make sure someone is safe. Or just to be polite. I stick my arm out the window as I pull out and give her a thumbs-up to let her know I’m cool, she can go back in.
I look up at the rear-view as I drive off. She is gone. The porch light blinks to life.
I have an hour before I have to be at the bar. No time for laundry. I’ll have to root through the pile of clothes on my bedroom floor to find something clean and decent to put on, something dry, something clean enough.
INTERS ECTION
I.
Even in the middle of the day, even with its big warehouse-sized windows that lined one whole wall, that bar was always dark. Age and weather had permanently fogged the panes, allowing only a pale haze to reach the closest tables, the rest of the room in shadow but for the odd strand of Christmas lights slung along the black walls, and the candle flames that licked the smoky air from the mouths of wax-covered bottles. It took a few moments for Sebastian’s sight to adjust as he shuffled in with his group, still engaged in debate from philosophy class. They’d talked loudly on the walk over, excitedly one-upping each other with remembered portions of theories they hardly grasped, their volume increasing when they stepped inside. Sebastian stopped mid-sentence when he caught the irritated stares of older students sitting nearby, their mouths releasing rings of smoke that stretched into silky O’s in the drifting grey overhead. They sat in pairs or unselfconsciously alone with pints of beer and burning cigarettes, spiral notepads and second-hand books, watching as the boisterous herd arranged chairs and dragged tables together.
He looked toward the windows and furrowed his brow as though he were trying to unravel a very tangled problem indeed, doing his best impression of someone who belonged there. A man with matted hair read L’Étranger by the filmy light, a young professor or a kitchen worker on break, his leg bouncing with anxiety or thrill as he turned a page. Sebastian believed the people here had crossed into a realm he hadn’t cracked, like the spines of the metaphysics books he’d bought in a manic rush that fall, and that now delivered only stabs of panic and reminders of his deficiencies from the corner of his room where they’d been abandoned in a heap.
Joy Division played gloomily from speakers hidden in the corners, briefly casting a pall on his group as they wriggled out of their coats, unwound their scarves and settled into their seats. He glanced at a foursome of graduate students drinking red wine from juice glasses, the music, he was certain, stoking legitimate memories as they murmured to one another with puffy eyes and a world-weariness he longed to exude.
The pretty girl from class took the chair across from him. Allie. He was surprised she’d come along. He’d narrowed his eyes at her in the lecture hall, and had expected she’d be gone by the drop deadline, so poorly did her glossy hair and pink lips fit with the rest of them in their blacks and greys and overall rejection of popular culture. She took out a lip balm and applied it, appearing to want to occupy her hands. She’d been quiet on the walk over. Someone ordered a pitcher and launched into a discussion on perception. Her eyes drifted from a spot on the table to the dripping candle wax and back down again as she listened, her straight blond hair falling against her face like two sides of a frame. Tenderness now cycled with the revulsion and lust and anger she ignited in him, along with the urge to reach for her hand.
The beer arrived and the guy who’d ordered it was now mangling parts of a theory he’d read or heard about in class and eventually worked it into another, more familiar topic that was better suited to his authoritative delivery. Something to do with colour-blindness. They realized one pitcher wasn’t enough and ordered another and began speaking with heightened enthusiasm, proffering their own semi-formed ideas about sight and sound and comprehension. What it is to see. To hear. How the vibrations of tiny bones in the ear became music.
“Love this tune,” a boy wearing an old tie over a T-shirt said, closing his eyes and nodding to “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” He let the chorus play then asked, “What do you think that time was like?”
“It wasn’t some paleontological era, man. It was the eighties.” That from another student who only spoke when he could douse a question or remark with sarcasm. He smirked and took a long drag from his smoke.
“The early eighties, smartass. You were barely sentient, let alone privy to the discontent of teenagers on an entirely different continent.”
“Do you have a point?”
“Do you believe this sound captured that time?”
“I thought I was too young to be privy to such discontent,” he said in a surprisingly good British accent.
Allie laughed.
The boy with the tie rolled his eyes and asked the rest of the table. They questioned what it meant to capture a time with music. Had now been captured? Kurt Cobain? Eddie Vedder? That wasn’t now, that was still before. They thought about it. A voice, was there a voice of now. Someone suggested that maybe it wasn’t about capturing a decade or a year but rather a period in the life of a particular person. Maybe that was more significant and told a greater truth about a time. They paused, listening for their own plights in the nihilistic baritone. If they felt something it remained unacknowledged, though it seemed some were holding back, afraid, perhaps, of how their personal reflections would be received.
Allie coughed, then spoke up for the first time. Sebastian’s breath quickened as the group turned to them. He feared she’d say something stupid. There was a poet she’d been reading, an Indian writer, she said, her voice trembling slightly. His poetry was heard in the tea fields in India, from the women in the fields. It moved her a great deal, and she asked what everyone thought was maintained in translation, what it was that roused something in her if so much was supposedly lost in the flight between two languages.
The others seemed to think about this for a moment, the smart aleck sipping his beer and grinning over the rim of his glass. The waitress brought nachos someone had ordered at a different table and Allie’s question got lost in the confusion. Sebastian saw her eyes dip down again and he leaned in to ask what it was that had moved her. She said the words were simple and clear, as if there was no kind of dressing on them to trump up their meaning. She said she could hear music in them even though she knew none of the original language. She believed there was music in every language.
“But not the same music, you know what I mean?” she asked. Sebastian nodded as if he really got what she was saying. She looked so happy to be talking, to be heard. She was not what he’d expected.
Allie went on, pulling an extra-long cigarette from her silver pack on the table. “Do you think poetry in translation is a hybrid of the music of the two languages? A kind of symphony, maybe?” She lit it and blew the smoke out slowly. “Maybe that’s why I was touched. Maybe it was a kind of connection, like a bridge or something.”
He poured them more beer. Either he or she had then remarked on the similarity between music in very different parts of the world, the sounds of instruments in Ireland and India, for instance, and they got very excited at the realization of this.
Soon the voices in the bar multiplied, the late classes over. Students who’d been sitting alone with their notebooks and manifestos were now met by friends who let heavy knapsacks slip fro
m their shoulders and thud to the ground. Another pitcher arrived. He grabbed it first and topped up both their glasses. She watched him, smiling, her eyelids heavy.
“Hey, did you ever see that Internet commercial?” he asked her, beer sloshing over the rim of the pitcher as he put it back down. “I keep asking people and they don’t know it. The one with the little girl from The Piano? She was standing on the top of a mountain somewhere, talking about this thing that was coming, that was going to connect everyone. It totally freaked me out when I first saw it. It felt like a warning, like she was sent from the future to prepare us for the coming of something that was going to change everything.”
Allie squinted at him as she smoked, as though trying to place it. “Hmm,” she said, kindly. “I’m not sure…”
“Come on, you’ve got to remember. It wasn’t that long ago. It was so crazy. It felt like some kind of international public service announcement. Intergalactic, even. I think she even called it the Information Superhighway.” He searched her face for some kind of recognition. “No? Nothing? Man, just thinking about it still gives me chills. It was like it was supposed to be this exciting thing but her eyes were just, I don’t know, kind of panicked.”
Allie smiled at him, tapping an extension of ashes into the black plastic ashtray. “Was it for Netscape Navigator or something? Or maybe you dreamt it.”
“No, no. I can’t believe you don’t remember.” He shook his head, smiling back in the candlelight that flickered now in true darkness. He checked his watch. He was supposed to meet someone. He didn’t want to go.
“Hang on a sec,” he said. “I have to make a call. Don’t go anywhere.” He got up and hurried to the hallway where the pay phone was. Third in line. He sighed and tapped the wall as he waited for the others to finish their conversations, wishing that he’d at least brought a pen so he could add to the names and song lyrics and expletives scrawled there, though he didn’t know what he would write if he had. When it was his turn, he quickly punched in the number of the girl he was seeing, eager to tell her he was running behind, that he’d be a little late.
Allie looked up as he sat back down, his smile dissolving when he saw the bill on the table, everyone finishing their beers. He wanted to order another round for the two of them but before he could suggest it she drew a twenty from her wallet and said she had somewhere to be. He said he did too. They all put on their coats and scarves and dug change and crumpled bills from their pockets. They heaved their knapsacks onto their backs and ambled as a group to the station, hugging, waving, nodding in the direction of their respective subways, buses and streetcars. Sebastian and Allie lagged behind, not saying where they were headed. She tucked her hair behind her ear when she talked. Their arms were nearly touching. Most of the others were gone as they lingered on the platform not yet saying goodbye, the two remaining guys from their group exchanging rapid-fire final thoughts. Sebastian only got on his streetcar when it was about to depart, and turned twice to wave to her on his way up the steps.
He sunk into one of the single seats that line the windows, buzzing with beer and trying to hide a smile so real it hurt his cheeks. He looked back, scanning the platform, but couldn’t see her anywhere. The doors closed with a gasp and the brakes released from the track beneath. The streetcar moved a few feet before it stopped again with a screech.
“Sorry,” Allie said to the driver as she climbed aboard. “I forgot to give someone something.”
She spotted Sebastian at once and went to him, a book in her outstretched hand. He reached out for it, their eyes locked as he took it, and then she turned and left.
In his memory she is standing on the platform, hands in the pockets of her coat, watching his streetcar pull out just as the rain starts coming down. He doesn’t know if this is what happened or something he once saw in a movie.
He looked down at the book’s cover. It took a moment to hear the rhythm of the syllables. Ra. Bin. Dra. Nath. Ra-BIN-dra-nath. Rabindranath Tagore. A collection of Indian Poems by the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore.
Pages were marked with red tabs. What she loved, he wondered, or what she didn’t understand? What she wanted to return to, of that he could be certain. He turned to one.
It is the pang of separation that spreads throughout the world and gives birth to shapes innumerable in the infinite sky.
It is this sorrow of separation that gazes in silence all night from star to star and becomes lyric among rustling leaves in rainy darkness of July.
It is this overspreading pain that deepens into loves and desires, into sufferings and joys in human homes; and this it is that ever melts and flows in songs through my poet’s heart.
He read it again, then again, trying to hear the music—the symphony—she had talked about. He had to remind himself that the red tabs were there for her, not for him, that she had affixed them to the pages before she knew he even existed. But now they were his and he thought that he would have put a red tab on that page anyway. He made a plan to buy a pack of tabs just like them and from then on to mark pages in books he found significant too.
It was raining hard and he might have been in love by the time he reached his stop, his heart warm and thumping and explosive, but the girl he was seeing, whom he was supposed to meet at her house blocks away, was there beneath the shelter waiting for him with an umbrella. She popped it open as he came down the steps. She said she thought he might have forgotten his.
For a very long time, it was the best day he could remember.
II.
Sebastian found the book of poems as he was packing to move into his first condo. It had fallen behind a row of law textbooks, its jacket dusty and folded in half. The edges of the pages were bent on an angle, but two red tabs remained.
He clucked at the memory and opened to one of them. He read the first couple of lines, then flipped to the other tab. He remembered something about music, languages. So much noise in his head now. The din of constant anxiety since he’d begun articling, his moving to-do list, the dull hangover skull-throb from the firm’s bonding event the night before. He leafed through trying to remember the name of the girl, what she looked like. He could see her eyes, the heavy lashes he’d mistaken for makeup, the way she looked at him, into him, when she’d handed over the book. The rush of feeling between them. He’d never forget it. Had he ever felt that with Petra? There wasn’t a moment like that with her, ever, in their two years together, nothing that stood out. He could hear her in the kitchen sorting utensils. Their love was more mature, less mercurial. It was a good thing, he reminded himself, tossing the book in a box. Even keel. The stuff of a lasting connection. He was going to surprise her that night at dinner, he was going to ask her to move in with him.
The memory of the girl fluttered around him as he resumed packing. He wondered where she was. He played the moment on the streetcar over and over in his mind like he was nineteen again.
“What are you smiling about?” Petra was at the door, hand on her hip.
“Nothing,” he said, startled. He looked away. “Do you remember that government commercial about the dawn of the Internet? The one with Anna Paquin?”
He hadn’t thought about it in years. He stepped over boxes to his desk and flicked on his computer. He typed “anna paquin information highway” into YouTube’s search box. In seconds it was there and it was nothing like he remembered. There was a mountain behind the actress and she was on the barren ground far in front of it. The landscape looked burnt, singed by the sun. She wore a black hat.
“There will be a road,” she said. “It will not connect two points. It will connect all points.”
Quick cuts. Flashes. Close and far.
“Its speed will be the speed of light.”
Petra was over his shoulder. “Totally don’t remember this.”
“It will not go from here to there,” Anna Paquin said. “There will be no more there.” She skipped rope. “There will only be here.” MCI Network. 1994. Viewed more than
thirteen thousand times. There were comments.
He clicked the window closed and shut his computer down, unsettled.
“Weird,” Petra said. “Kinda ominous, eh?”
No, it wasn’t. Not the way he’d thought it was. It was a commercial for a company, not a PSA. He no longer thought that Anna Paquin had looked worried, or imagined that she’d been led into a room under tight security before the ad was shot, a bright white room with no windows where the few intelligence workers privy to what was coming let her in on the secret so she would look informed. It hadn’t been like that at all. She’d probably had a private trailer and a folding canvas chair on the dried ground, production assistants milling about between takes with sandwiches and coffee and walkie-talkies.
“Yeah, totally,” he said.
“I was thinking Thai tonight.”
“Perfect.”
“The usual?”
He cleared a shelf, letting the books crash down into an open box. She looked at him with eyes that said, Was that necessary?
“Babe?” her mouth said. “The usual?”
“Yeah, perfect.”
He heard her efficient steps recede down the hall. He wiped the dust off with his sleeve, and moved up to the next shelf.
III.
There is a hawk perched on the edge of a roller coaster. It is winter and the amusement park is closed, dormant. Isolated. The hawk looks over the highway from its stead on the twisted metal rail, its feathers puffed and ruffled in the wind, its eyes watching the passing cars going through nowhere. Nothing here now between two places, the place you left and the place you’re going.
Sebastian returns his gaze to the highway in front of them. “You see the hawk?”
His wife, Melody, would have had the perfect view, her eyes set out the passenger window for some time. “No. Where is it?”
“Back there. On the Wilde Beast.”
The Dead Husband Project Page 12