by John Metcalf
“What are aspens?”
“Poplars.”
David’s fingertip traced the swell of her hip, the honey skin, the gold of Gauguin.
“Who wrote that?”
“Hopkins.”
“‘Airy cages’,” she said. “I like that. That’s the tall ones.”
Black eye-shadow, enormous dark eyes.
Kohl-darkened eyes, gold ornaments on the light gold body lit by the flames, the gleam of pearls, turning, turning, the throb and patter of fingers over the skin of the derbecki, the shrill urging of the oud.
“And deer,” she said. “Wild. In the woods behind the house. They’d come down in the dawn to raid the garden.”
“What about bears?” said David. “I like bears.”
“You’ve got to have blueberries for bears.”
“O.K. We’ll have blueberries.”
“Bears that eat blueberries do little piles of blue turds. ”
“Polar bears have got blue tongues,” said David. “Remember that one at Granby Zoo?”
She leaned towards him and tugged at the hair on his chest with her lips.
“And an old tumbledown barn,” she said. “With a work place in it and lots of rusty boxes full of nails and screws and things.”
“Linseed oil,” said David.
“And wood shavings.”
“I’m not much good at woodwork,” David said.
“Well we could just go in there and touch things. My uncle used to have a place like that in St. Jean.”
“Log fires, though,” said David.
“And long cords of wood stacked behind the house.”
She stirred, shifted her legs.
“If you do that,” she said, “I can’t concentrate.”
“Mmmm.”
From the living room, they could hear the sounds, the click, click, click, click, the ratchet pull of the handle of Jim’s adding-machine as he worked on the raw material of his thesis, stacks of bundled report cards. He was compiling the marks scored by each student during each of the four years of high school in each subject and correlating the arithmetic mean with the score attained on the provincial matriculation exam. He suspected a positive correlation.
“Can you plant moss?” said Susan.
Her hair tickled his face.
“Mmmm.”
She rolled over onto her back, kicking off the sheet, pulling him over across her.
“You’re really asking for it,” she said.
“I know.”
His lips brushed her dark, stiff nipples.
“Do you think it’s good for old men to do it twice?” she breathed into his ear.
“Don’t be cheeky.”
“Cheeky,” she said, gripping his buttocks.
Her hair was spread over the pillow. Straw Hat. Her body smelled musky.
“Why are you laughing?” he whispered.
“The springs.”
Wild counterpoint of bedsprings and adding-machine, the knock of the bed’s headboard against the wall. CRACK and the blind shot up.
“Oh, Jesus Christ!” said David.
“Lovely. Don’t stop!”
“The Scots lady!”
“Jealous!”
Lying back in the propped pillow, the ashtray on Susan’s stomach, they watched the curling smoke rise, their bodies sticky with sweat. Wind shivered the blind. The electric fire was making sizzing noises. Without the fire, purchased by Susan, love-making had been an ordeal. The heat supplied by Monsieur Gagnon caused goosebumps. Jim’s adding-machine was clicking in the living room.
“Isn’t balling good?” said Susan.
“I wish you wouldn’t use expressions like that,” said David.
“Why? You say ‘fuck’ and ‘screw’ and . . .”
“Yes, but not . . . here.”
“You’re funny,” she said.
She turned his wrist to look at his watch.
“I’m supposed to be at a movie with Frances. We went straight from school so I’d better leave soon.”
She sat up in bed and David ran his finger down over the knobbles of her spine. He started humming. She twisted round and looked at him.
“Have I got a spot coming on my chin?” she said.
“It’s a bit red.”
“It always comes when I’m going to get my period.”
“Good old spot,” said David.
“Does it make me ugly?”
“Course not.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
He sat up, kissed her chin, and fell back onto the pillow.
“Why are you smiling?” she said.
She touched the creases at the sides of his mouth, smoothed his eyebrows.
“Umm?”
“Feel good,” he said.
“Do you still love me with spots?”
“Especially with spots.”
He started humming again – and then ascended into song.
. . . . . . I’ll not want,
He makes me down to lie.
And Susan, kneeling on the bed, her hair down over one shoulder, sang a high descant.
In pastures green He leadeth me,
The quiet waters by.
“For Christ’s SAKE!” yelled Jim from the living room.
Their voices, bass and soaring, sang
And in my Father’s house, alway,
My DWELLING-PLACE SHALL BE!
Chapter Three
Only the monitor was in the library. She was shelving books from the trolley she pulled after her. David wished she’d hurry up; he didn’t want to miss his coffee. He pretended to be searching through the literature section. A tatty and disgraceful offering but it contained most of the standard authors in standard editions. The Oxford Book of English Verse – the familiar dark blue cloth, gilt title. India-paper editions of the Romantics – Blake, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats. Apart from Masefield, Dylan Thomas, and the Faber Book of Twentieth Century Verse, the twentieth century might not have happened.
Would she never turn the corner?
It was typical of Mrs. Lewis’ individualistic approach to have combined Dewey 800, 810, 820 and 890 under 800.
David rippled his fingertip over the spines. Faber and Faber. You could open them at any page and tell them by the design, the beauty of the typeface. Faber. He remembered how as a child he had been impressed by the publication date being in Roman numerals; how he had refused to learn them, preferring the foreignness, the mystery.
One Christmas he had cried onto a book, his tears splotching paler spots and streaks on the dark blue cover. He would not be comforted until his father had promised him a new copy.
Even before the words had shone and blossomed, before the wonderful figures filled his head – the Dog With Eyes Like Saucers, Robin Hood, Long John Silver, Quartermain and Gagool, Fagin and Bumble, The Scarlet Pimpernel – he had loved the books they lived in.
A familiar ochre dust jacket. A book by “Q”.
In his father’s tobacco smelling study, that book had been on the second shelf near the door above the Dickens and Conrad. He sat on the fringed carpet, his father behind him clicking and clacking at the typewriter. What might “Q” mean? What secrets hid behind that heavy black letter with its graceful, curling tail?
He saw again the loops and scrawl of his childish handwriting as it scored its way down flyleaf after flyleaf.
David Appleby,
45 Cherville Avenue,
Southbourne,
Hampshire,
England.
And then?
The sound of the books thumping onto the shelves was hollow, more distant.
The World.
David smiled at the ochre jacket, the thick down-strokes of the Q.
The Universe.
The Solar System.
He looked round and realized that the girl had turned the corner. The minute hand of the electric clock jumped forward; the minutes of recess were slipping away.
&nbs
p; Mrs. Lewis, an inveterate buyer of Sets and Complete Works, a devotee of fat Anthologies and Publishers’ Remainders, a faithful consumer of the products of Time-Life Inc., always headed the recess coffee rush. She would now be ensconced in the most comfortable chair in the staffroom detailing the state of her rheumatism, the aches, the throbs, the twinges, the seizures, and delivering to some unfortunate an account of the bodily currents which ran between the pure copper bracelets on her left wrist and right ankle.
David slipped behind the counter and looked over the newly arrived pile. The novels were still to come in. She’d been at it again – The World’s Greatest Speeches, Favourite Stories for Every Girl and Boy, Great Canadian Disasters – but he found four of the poetry books he’d entered on the Suggestions List. They were unstamped. He took them and slipped out.
He hurried down the stairs and along to the staffroom where he stashed the books in his cloakroom locker. He stole books from the library regularly and gave them to Susan and the three students in his grade eleven classes who read.
In the crowded Common Room, he took a cup and saucer from the counter and joined the queue. Above the coffee urn hung one of Eaton’s Canadian landscapes. Spring, Summer, and Fall decorated the other walls.
“You remember our little conversation last week. . . .”
“Pardon?”
“Well,” said Mrs. Gowly, “she still hasn’t given me her set of Moonfleet and it’s three weeks now.”
David tut-tutted.
“And her class are doing Sunshine Sketches now. I enquired. And she’s still got Cue for Treason. I mean, we do have schedules. It just isn’t reasonable. And the trouble – my husband brought home a roll of wallpaper and I had my class cover those Cue for Treason and I’m informed she made her class tear the covers off.”
David shook his head.
“And they’ve got to read it in time for the Easter exam.”
“Exactly,” said David, “exactly.”
He had to tip the urn towards him to get any coffee out; it smelled bitter. He took a spoon from the saucer of a used cup and Mr. Weiss passed him the milk jug.
“Not, of course, that she hasn’t every right,” said Mrs. Gowly.
“Sorry?”
“To tear the covers off. But they are a protection. That’s what I don’t understand.”
“Quite,” said David.
Garry was waving him over.
“If you’ll excuse me,” he smiled. “Mr. Westlake seems to . . .”
Garry squeezed up on the long couch making room at the end. David took one of Garry’s cigarettes from the packet on the coffee table.
“Grierson wants to see us at twelve-thirty,” said Garry. “We’ll have to cancel the rehearsal.”
“What’s he want to see us for?”
“He didn’t say. I just saw him in the corridor.”
“In his office?”
“Yes, something about the play, I expect.”
Oafish Hubnichuk came over and started bellowing into the wall-phone, his vast buttocks inches from David’s head. David glared up at Hubnichuk’s back, at Hubnichuk’s height and bulk.
WHAT? WELL, HE PICKED UP AN ASSIST. YEAH. FROM THE BLUE LINE.
“Can you get one of the kids to put up a notice on the auditorium ?” said Garry. “I’m teaching till twelve-thirty and I’ve got to get some maps now for next period.”
“Ah!” said David. “From the ‘Communications Resource Centre’.”
YEAH! WHEN HE WENT UP THE LEFT BOARDS. YEAH! YEAH!
They stared at Hubnichuk.
“I hope Grierson isn’t going to quibble. . . .”
YOU PUT YOUR MONEY ON THE LEAFS!
“I didn’t hear that,” said Garry, “because MR. HUBNICHUK IS SHOUTING.”
Hubnichuk looked round and winked.
“Hope he isn’t going to quibble about the money for the sets,” said David, “because I ordered the timber from Pascal’s last week.”
“Shouldn’t think so,” shrugged Garry.
“By the way,” said David, “the phantom raider struck again this morning. Liberated four more.”
GRARF, GRARF laughed Hubnichuk.
“Cummings, Auden, Layton, and a new Ted Hughes.”
Garry smiled and shook his head.
“If they catch you, you’ll never win the Lamp of Learning Award, you know.”
“Gives you pause, that,” said David. “Leave me a couple of cigarettes, will you?”
NOT A CHANCE! HE’S GOOD FOR YEARS YET!
He moved further up the couch away from Hubnichuk’s looming bulk.
Near the door, Garry was buttonholed by Mr. Follet, his department head. Garry smiled, nodded, said something. Follet chortled. David watched the play of expressions on Garry’s face. How pale he was! When he was emphasizing, he always ran his fingers through his short, straw-coloured hair. During rehearsals he became a different person, the lick of hair curling down into his eyes, furiously thrust back only to fall again and again as he gestured and shouted in mottled rage. Follet listening now, smoothing his ghastly Chaplin moustache with a deliberate thumb.
David felt a surge of affection for Garry as he watched them; humiliating that a man like Garry should have to take direction from that pompous, flatulent little crapper, the vile Follet who had once seriously referred to Shakespeare as “The Swan of Avon.”
Apart from Miss Leet, who favoured Ayn Rand, Garry was the only teacher in the school who read books. They had discovered each other about a month after David’s arrival the previous year. He couldn’t remember how, exactly, but he remembered their circlings, their probings into who liked what, who had read this, seen that – the conversations becoming warmer and more intimate as they discovered common enthusiasms for “Carry On” films, Evelyn Waugh, Ingmar Bergman, and Nathaniel West. Garry had given him Ring Lardner. Difficult, too, to say when, exactly, they had stopped fencing and posing – perhaps after the Dashiell Hammett vs Raymond Chandler argument. Perhaps after the evening last winter David had persuaded him to go to the Esquire Show Bar to hear Howling Wolf.
GRARF, GRARF
June had been in hospital that week and they’d stayed up half the night. That was the night the drunk in Champ’s had said to the manager, “Who do you think you are? King Shit of Piss Island? Eh? King Shit of the Yukon?”
And then they’d tamped down the drink with food somewhere and somehow they’d been driving past the headquarters of the Board and Garry had stopped and they’d climbed the steps, treading into the new snow, and pissed together on the big brass doors.
Snowing heavily and Garry had flung out an arm and thundered to the cars labouring past below,Who are these who thus against Our portals . . .
and David, drink and happiness inspired, had said,. . . do, intemperate, urinate?
He wondered if Follet would believe that the almost boyish figure in front of him, charming, neat and energetic-looking in slacks and sports jacket, delivered murderous imitations – Follet lamenting the decline of standards and the barbarian without the gate, Follet deploring the Canadian monotone as compared with the instrumental beauty of English voices, Follet excoriating the intellectual paucity of Canadian universities, Follet confidentially deploring the presence in Montreal of vast numbers of those of the “Hebrew persuasion.”
It was Garry who had saved him from Follet on numerous occasions last year; whenever Follet threatened inspections of David’s Canadian History class, Garry had prepared the lessons. It was Garry, ten years older than David, who listened to his complaints, commiserated, offered advice. It was Garry who lent him money to fly to England when his mother was ill; Garry who talked him out of his more risky schemes of revenge and retaliation.
But their friendship, now, he realized, was slowly becoming confined to school, to occasional parties, to those few times Garry could get away for a beer. His visits to the house, invitations to dinner, were dropping off. June and Chrissy were becoming a restraint between them, a subject they
rarely mentioned.
He wished he could like the ghastly June but she was making it increasingly clear that she regarded him as an enemy, as a force which pulled Garry back towards enthusiasms, late hours, and drinking. She’d been particularly annoyed about their producing the play; after one long rehearsal recently she’d managed to forgive him for about two hours for spilling a drink and treading on Chrissy’s Cat-in-a-Boat.
Follet clapped Garry on the shoulder and did his jocund chortle again.
The obscene little rotundity.
He was certain they could work Sir Charles Pharco-Hollister on Follet but Garry kept saying that it needed more careful planning and preparation. He’d done some preliminary work the week before, alluding to a non-existent historical journal,
“. . . a rather fascinating theory in the O.N.Q.”
“The . . . . . . ?”
“Oxford Notes and Queries.” which had discussed new rumours of Queen Victoria’s bastard son. There was mentioned the possibility of his having been sent to Canada. Family papers recently and fortuitously discovered at Harewood House.
“Good Lord! That’d shake the old dovecots up a bit,” Follet had said.
The word “Oxford” alone had him hooked.
Some of the staff were sure that Garry would be made the next head of the history department when Follet retired at the end of the year.
Mr. Weinbaum had been talking to Mr. Healey, David remembered, last year, last summer when the promotions and transfers were posted on the Principal’s Notice Board.
“Westlake’ll get History,” Weinbaum had said. “You watch him go. This time next year – just see if I’m not right.”
Everyone was in shirtsleeves and drinking Cokes. Lunchtime. A loud bridge postmortem going on at the table near the window.
Mr. Healey, the woodwork man, was short, fiercely contained. He had come from Yorkshire originally where silence is equated with profundity. Mr. Healey had considered Mr. Weinbaum’s remark.
(He was reputed to burst into the girls’ shower room from time to time, shouting,
“Is there someone in here smoking?”)
After a long pause, he said,