There Are No Elders

by Clarke, Austin; Rooke, Leon;

  He held her hand but she was thinking of her aunt on the mother’s side who’d come down at Christmas and offered to take the children to Orillia. She’d miss them. She would be lonely without them. But she could have Rick for herself. And she would not have to wait until after midnight to make sure they were asleep, so she could do it on the couch with Rick. Once, almost reaching that time, she had closed her eyes, pulling expectation faster through her body, but something warned her about complete submission, and she had kept her eyes open, and out of the bedroom where they all slept on bunk-beds, out of the greater darkness of that small room, came her little sister, unsure where she was, rubbing her eyes, calling. She’d jumped up, forgetting she was undressed. She’d made the sign of the cross, and then had led the child back into the dark small room.

  “What the fuck!” he’d said, as she searched in the darkness for her dress, found it on the floor, and put it back on; and sat on the couch beside him. Under her leg, she could feel a wetness. She felt shame. “What the fuck!”

  When did I decide to marry that bastard? When did I throw my life away...sitting now on the mattress with her overnight bag beside her on the hardwood floor, the cockroaches crawling in and out of it; she counted ten little ones; and her shoes and pantihose in the bag; her alarm clock beside her on the left hand. And she smiled and wondered if there was something wrong with her that in all her life she always placed her alarm clock, the same alarm clock, as a young girl, as a married woman, and now as a woman alone, on the left side: she was right-handed.

  It started when he was drunk. He always said he’d had a hard day at the meat packers, he blamed it on his work, and on the beers he had chugalugged before coming home; and then he walked out, angrier than before, and she spent the time sobbing and reading her small red leather Bible. Her mother’s gift the day she was confirmed.

  Every time he was drunk, he blamed work, all the cutting up of carcasses, and he blamed the beers he drank, and the chasers of rye whisky at the bar around the corner; and he walked out, after he’d delivered the blows to her body and face, any place his blind hands and fists could find, and she sat sobbing and thankful that there was no child to witness all this; and she continued to read her small red leather Bible, torn at the spine.

  In the midst of her sobbing, she planned how she would leave him, and be safe so that he would not know where she lived, and follow her, and stand in the shadows, outside. She went to work on Monday mornings at the restaurant wearing dark glasses to hide the swelling around her eyes; and she hid the wemms on her face and neck with make-up.

  When it happened the last time, four nights ago, he almost killed her. He slapped her around. And she did not put up her hands to shield the blows. She stood there, feeling the pain and the humiliation deep down. He was not satisfied. His anger was not effective, there was no painful reaction. So, he began to beat her with his fists. He was in the ring again, fighting his first amateur bout and the man in front of him was taking his best shots. He struck her with a right cross. And he remembered that it was the second round, and the man in front of him was dancing around, making him look clumsy and foolish before the screaming crowd. “Ya bum! Ya bum!” He could hear the boos now, five years later. And he hit her with a left hook. And there was silence. He could hear the silence around him, he could smell the ointment, and taste the blood that had formed in his mouth from the blows this stupid son-of-a-bitch, the fancy-foot-work dude had caused. Now, he could smell her perfume, and her body. And in the midst of his violence there was an urge to screw her, fuck her to death. The left hook had made her face ugly. And just before it landed, he could still see her beautiful face, so fresh and so beautiful, the face he had kissed so many times, the face he gloried in when they were out together in the neighbourhood tavern drinking beer. And when his hand left her face, it reached for her blouse, and even though he did not intend it, his hand ripped away most of her blouse. And he could see that she was not wearing a bra. It was unexpected. If he could call back the anger, the violence, the slaps and the blows, he would have caressed her breasts which had given him so much comfort and satisfaction.

  He wished he could call back the violence.

  She said nothing. A long time. A time in which she relived every day of her life. In which she saw herself dead. A time when nothing else existed but her small roped-off ring inhabited by blows and sounds and boos and punches and blood. She did not exist outside of this. He saw it too, and it made him mad. As if he had thrown his best punches, and the foe in front of him was absorbing all his toughness and meanness, all his power.

  He grabbed her by the neck and squeezed. He was getting delight from the power of his hands. Her eyes became wider, and then were closed. Her colour was changing. She was beginning to shake and quiver. And become subject to his strength. And again the astonishing urge to make love to her, to screw her, to fuck her, mixed with his anger, making his action one of delight. A smile came to his face. She saw it. And if was then that she felt this was the last time. She saw death. And she saw the ring begin to get smaller, and the three ropes were getting closer to her, and were about to wrap themselves round her. And miraculously, the ring stopped its constricting, and began to expand back outwards. It became the room in which he was strangling her. It became as large as the house itself; larger, larger, until the entire neighbourhood was encompassed. And she could see life outside this arena of blows and insult and degradation.

  She thought she had killed him. He crouched over, holding his testicles, bending over until he was like a hairpin, grabbing his testicles to quell the agonizing pain. She thought she had killed him. And that is how she left him, on his knees, moaning, clutching himself, with a look of helplessness in his eyes, which she saw turning to inexplicable love.

  And this is what went through her mind as she lay helpless on the mattress in the borrowed, empty apartment, with cockroaches crowding around her. And this is what went through her mind as she stood, in the crowded subway car, pressed by the man who was trying to read her thoughts, who applied more force to her thigh, this stranger whose cologne or perfume or aftershave lotion was so much like the scent of Rick when she’d first met him, so much so she wished she could take a chance with him.

  The train stops. She comes alive from the corridors of her past she had been walking during its ride, and the doors open, and she is bright in the fluorescent light of the platform, and as she nears the concrete steps she is moved a little faster by the crowd behind her, touching her, brushing her. She can already see the light of the day pouring down the exit, in the shaft of concrete, and she can feel the power of the sun and she sees a white cloud sailing in the skies, and it is this that pulls her from the underground rough walls of the exit, up into the concrete of the street.

  I see her leave. And with her there leaves a part of myself, for I had fashioned and created her in the image of lust of my desire this morning when there was nothing else on my mind.

  I try to remember the woman’s clothes. Her blouse is pink and cut by a tailor. And her skirt is black, and above her knees, for it was the sight of her legs that had pulled these thoughts from me. I stand, holding on to the same metal pole she leaned on. I wish I could have got off when she did, and follow her up the steps and walk at a distance that did not threaten her, and match her step for step, into the street, along the sidewalk, through the heavy glass door of the building she will enter, and into the elevator with her, and into her office, into her life. But I think of the fear that resides on women’s faces when the man who walks close to them carries an identity they cannot penetrate. It is the fear that is painted on their face along with their mascara, even at this early hour, that hinders my daring.

  Not So Old, But Oh So Professional

  There she would be, sitting, chatting, drinking coffee, as she compared the night’s progress and profits, dabbing her lips to remove perspiration, and she would touch the make-up on her cheeks, pale from the time she has spent outside in the night air; a
nd with a glance at the people entering the all-night restaurant, she’d know who they were and what they could be, to her.

  I knew the right time to catch her there, to keep an eye on her in this restaurant at the bottom of Church near Granby, an all-night restaurant that had a single line of chairs and tables. Four people able to sit at each. Five at the counter, which ends where the poker slot machines begin. There are plants everywhere, dying, dead, real and artificial. It’s a jungle. There is a washroom with a door near the slot machines with no symbol for man or woman on the door. The customers, and the women who sit and chat and dab their faces, they all know what to do when they push that door inwards. I have never entered that nameless door.

  There are usually four women who take their coffee together. One looks about fifteen, the more I come to see and know her. And one, the one who looks the oldest, could be no more than twenty-five. She looks like seventeen. But I want her to be twenty-one.

  She is terrifying, tall and strong, the shortness of her dress showing the muscles in her calves and in her thighs. I try to imagine her scent. I have tried to imagine her cleanliness. Not that: but whether she is meticulous about teeth and underarms.

  I wiped that thought from my mind. For many nights, when the temperature was below freezing, she stood in the same square metre of concrete at the corner of McGill and Church, only moving, it seemed, because a Toronto by-law threatened something about loitering. When the temperature was below zero, I was muffled, scarved, and bent at an angle to protect me from the cold. She strode like a sentry in bum-bum shorts.

  I imagined that the leotards or pantihose she wore were the identical tint and colour of her skin. Kept her hot. But I changed that opinion one night when I passed close to her. I passed an inch from her, and was glad to be so close, and I saw how young she was, and that her beautiful skin was unprotected by leotards or pantihose. I could see the vapour of her breathing. The light from the pole beside the house owned by the Anglican Church gave her skin a porcelain white sheen. I could smell the scent she wore on her short black dress. I could hear her breathing. And the vapour that came from her nostrils and her mouth mixed with the vapour caused by my anxiety. I looked over my shoulder twice, to see if the two women in cars driving slowly past, had seen me, had known me. I looked over my shoulder a third time.

  She was terrifying. It was her beauty and her youth. I could see a mole on the right side of her mouth. I could see the difference in the natural pale colour of her skin and the skin of her make-up. I could smell the perfume she was wearing, beckoning me, clothing me in a kind of comfort and making me strong like a man sometimes wishes to be, and wishes it to be known; a scent that fitted me into a small hurried hotel room, around the corner at Jarvis and Carlton, fitted me between those thighs I had seen for so many weeks from a distance, slipping me in and slipping me out under the nodding approval of the night manager at the desk.

  “Hi, honey,” she said. I did not want to hear her voice. Nor hear her mission and purpose. I wanted to invent a voice for her, so I said, “How do you do?” I chose this formal greeting to make her know I was different, and to make her say no more.

  She was a woman, walking many miles in that square concrete metre, who had seen and heard all kinds of falseness and had known by touch and by size, every form of deceit and depravity. And she had known these things from standing in her small kingdom three cold metres north of the Anglican Church House, which proclaimed from its sign in the front door, that it was reverent and liberal about the station of this beautiful young woman and all she was suffering.

  Before I could pass out of her sway, her greeting changed into a song. Somewhere over the rainbow and the quality of her soprano pricked me, as if a small drop of water had trickled onto my neck. It was snowing on this night. I could hear the lure, the secret message like a code in the way she sang. I did not find it difficult to see what bliss, what colour, what bodiless ecstasy I could be in for, lying on my back in a cloudy heaven, borne across the tops of the skyscraping buildings surrounding she and me, far, far above the screams from the coupled men who walked like sailors out of the drunken Stables Bar & Ranch House down at the other end of the street. Somewhere...over...the rainbow.

  “Would you do a thing like that?”

  “Would you?”

  “Would you?”

  “Not if it was free!”

  “They say that it is a fucking experience!”

  “I understand if you go with one o’ them, man, you don’t want go home and hear no shit from you wife. You feel like your skin been stroked by the leaves of a eucalyptus branch.”

  “A fella tell me that once for his birthday, some friends at this work rented a hotel room, and when they cut the cake, Jesus Christ! A woman came out. He said it went all right, too. But the thing that had him a bit disappointed was that he wanted to spend the whole night, and he couldn’t she being on a per diem.”

  “There no difference between one o’ them and a wife, between a woman who do that for money, and a woman you live with. One is cash on delivery. The other, timeless time-payment. Fish is pork, man. I tell men so. The only difference is whether you believe in cash-and-carry.”

  “But what about diseases?”

  “You never heard of a French-letter?”

  “For a man to have a wife who is a total woman to him, she have to be a mixture of whore, talker, savior, healer, something of a masseur and something of a seducer.”

  “Who told you so?”

  “Life! I learn it, in the school of hard-knocks!”

  “If that’s the definition of wife, you may’s well marry a whore!”

  “What is a whore?”

  “You tell me!”

  “I don’t agree with that name, even.”

  The night was snowing, thick, on the sidewalk, and passing cars clogged the street and brought me close to this woman, no more than the twenty-one years I had imagined her to be; and she was in the right light of winter, the light that makes images fuzzy and sometimes soft, and she looked younger. She was not wearing leotards. I imagined that she drank brandy to give herself warmth. Sauntering within the square metre of her concrete turf, she brushed by me as I moved away from her. I felt sad. I wanted to make a more lasting contact with her. She must be filled with brandy or with conviction to be in this smothering cold. But that did not make sense. Brandy would make her miscalculate. That would not do. She was just a young tough kid who loved the cold.

  It was a Monday night, days after, and it was not snowing. I was drinking my fourth coffee. I did not want the Vietcong who owned the joint to chase me out. I lit my fourth cigarette, named after an Egyptian king, professing that it contained Turkish tobacco, and therefore was good for my lungs. She came in in a fury, her face reddened by her rage. She threw her handbag down. Its long strap upset a can of pop at her friend’s table, and out of her bag came a package of cigarettes. Extra long. And a pink Bic lighter, and a shiny blue packet, the lettering spelling out a name similar to the cigarettes I was smoking. She pushed it back into her black purse. “What the fuck?” she said, not expecting an answer; and she got none. The other woman looked up at her, smiled, and returned to pushing the straw up and down in her can of pop, as if no one had spoken. “What the fuck?”

  She got up as quickly as she had sat down, went to the Vietcong, said something to him which I could not hear, walked past me, and went to the stool in front of the slot machines. They were not real poker slot machines, like Las Vegas, which spat quarters out when you made a hit, three Kings and a pair of Aces. These just showed what you could have won. A man wearing a jogging suit, about five-ten, came out from the washroom, a black leather money pouch slung below his waistline making his belly bulge. He covered the room like a security camera. Nothing, no one, escaped his eye. Then, he sat down beside her. He sat down beside her as if he was her cousin, known to her, and needing no introduction. He did not greet her. He just sat, folding his right hand over the three rings he wore on his lef
t hand. And she continued punching the keys on the slot machine. I couldn’t see whether she had discarded a King and a Queen and had kept three nines. I would have told her to throw in the three nines and keep the King and the Queen, though they were in different suits. I took my cigarette from the ashtray and I put my white coffee mug down. It had an old smear of lipstick on it. In the mirror behind her, I was able to see her hands, and the man’s fist, and the bag, and the three nines which she had kept. If I got the chance to be close to her, I would give her lessons in draw poker.

  The man on the stool beside her, now folding his left hand over the three rings on his right hand, to my relief, looked through me, as if I were not there. I didn’t want him to think I was there. All the time, in their quiet conversation, conducted by glances and gestures, I was trying to follow any transaction. And in all this time, all they had done was look at each other, careful and diligent to give the impression to the less observant, that he was just a man sitting beside a woman who was punching slot machine playing cards and he, swirling his rings round his fingers, only a man biding his time. And that was all he did, until he got up and moved away from her, in his detached manner. She went on punching cards on the machine. He passed beside me, and without pause, said to my astonishment, as if he were saying a password, “How’s the writing racket?”

  I waited to see what she would do. And she did nothing. Not to the keyboard. She took a portable telephone from her bag, unflapped the mouthpiece, pulled the thin black wire out, brushed strands of reddish hair out of her eyes, and held that side of her head to the phone. I tried to read her lips, without success: I invented what she was saying, that the man who’d been sitting beside her was pestering her. That did not seem like a reasonable conversation, under the circumstances, so I made her say, “Can you tell me which is higher? Ace, King, Queen, Jack, ten in the same suit? Or five Queens?” And that was not only unrealistic, but made her out to be stupid, and I did not want to imagine her stupid. I was mulling over these thoughts when I heard a voice behind me. It was the woman whose can of pop had tipped over earlier. She too was talking on a portable telephone.