“He’s so thin.” Amy patted his head as he nuzzled her with his leathery nose. His fur felt warm under her hands. A couple came from the beach and stood on the patio and Costa rose from the table to seat them. The dog stayed by Amy’s side, and after a few minutes, lay down and fell asleep under her table as she continued to read, and as she did, stopping on occasion to ponder what she was reading, she absent-mindedly stroked the dog so that under her hand she could feel his coat, now soft and cool in the shade.
VII
During the wedding reception, I smiled a lot and watched the crowd without saying much; I watched Stephanie’s relatives drink and laugh, I listened to stories and felt envy so potent I was ill. Stephanie was a beautiful woman, I’d mentioned that, and together they were a beautiful couple with everything before them—trips to the continent, summers in villas by the Aegean or Adriatic, this was their future. And me? Well I would most likely become someone’s secretary, a servant of sorts, my desires or my thoughts never sought. Stephanie herself had hinted at my taking up such a post in her house but I had not pursued the option. I remember watching her and her new husband leave, the wave of her white-gloved hand from the car and shouts of goodbye. They were to honeymoon at a resort on Santorini, a place she described as brilliant with sun and where light fell strong and full on the white of the sea walls and the villas. She was sitting in her bedroom as she discussed her plans with me and although she did not describe it in such detail—did I mention she was incapable of any true appreciation of anything beyond her physical self?—I could see it, glorious and full in the summer morning when the sunlight fell, sticky and warm as honey. I know now that these images are true because I have been there and felt such mornings, and the cool Aegean breeze at night.
Stephanie became bored in Santorini, that was the story. She wanted to see different scenery, and so her husband, woefully unsuited or unaccustomed to the whims of a rich, spoilt wife, decided to take her to Crete, to explore some of its outer reaches. She complained she’d been there and her husband said, “Ah, but not to the west coast to the incredible lookouts I’ve heard about, so remote you have to get there by foot.”
Before I continue, there is something I need to share, something which may help to explain the disbelief I always felt about the possibility of happiness, something from my past which in my telling of this tale I glossed over. And that was that the facts surrounding my parents’ death were in truth dramatic and a turning point in my life. I tell everyone it was a car accident—what other story can explain losing them on the same day?—when it was actually a murder suicide. My father, always a morose man, killed my mother with a kitchen mallet—hit her on the head, but in all fairness to him there was evidence of only one sharp blow. Just like her to fall dead at the first retribution for a lifetime of nagging. He in turn hanged himself. It was a Saturday and I came home from a friend’s house in the late afternoon to find them both. That’s when I went to live with my father’s sister, who shared his reticence, but not his melancholic nature. And that’s when I started to read and sketch in earnest, but I told you all this before. Some people where we lived felt sorry for me, but many more saw me, either secretly or when speaking candidly, as the offspring of two strange people, someone not to be trusted.
When I told Stephanie that my parents died in a car accident, she said “Really?” with blunt curiosity. Actually, I liked that about her, as I came to like the hatred she created in me, the way my duplicity felt like a secret I kept and gave definition to my very being. I liked too the bald way Stephanie would ask questions about the horrible things in life: accidental deaths, murders, abuses of any sort. If she hadn’t been wealthy and trained to project a certain reserve, she would have loved the tabloids with their ghoulish coverage of the seedier aspects of the news. “So, did you get to see the bodies…I mean after?” I had never been asked this question and was not sure which lie to tell, so I just shook my head “no” in a closed way that made her think the memory was too painful to recount.
But where was I before I backtracked? Oh yes, Stephanie and her husband went to Crete, staying in the town of Chania at a hotel near the port.
VIII
Amy dropped the book. So they’d been here. Perhaps they drove by this very spot, on another warm, bright day, identical to the day she was sitting in; perhaps they passed this very shore and the sun was just as hot on their skin as it was on Amy’s.
The day before Amy had visited the port, ate at an outdoor restaurant that looked out to the water, and shopped at one of the many shops that catered to tourists. She had bought a leather wallet for her son and a shawl for herself. How many years ago would Alec and Stephanie been here? And how many other people have moved through that town with its ancient buildings, cobblestones, and satiny water slapping the dock? During lunch Amy was aware of the teeming life that had for hundreds of years invaded the port and nearby streets, the constant wash of change, the families and stories, the intrigues and traumas. When Stephanie and her husband stayed there, no doubt they stayed in the most luxurious hotel, eating dinner out by the water, as the evening swept in like cool silk against skin. Looking out past the children, the commotion by the shore, Amy could imagine the two of them, tall and thin in pale linen; he’d be wearing a fedora and holding an ebony cane. It pleased her to think Stephanie would be wearing the brooch she’d found in Athens, that pin with its setting of silver and ruby, that caught the sun in a drop of red.
IX
There was a breeze off the sea that floated into their room at night, while Stephanie curled beside her husband and he looked into the dark, smoking cigarettes, thinking, a careless arm over his head. This is the image I created of their honeymoon nights, her swooning slumber and his dark contemplation of what his life would be from then on. Soon after arriving they decided to rent a car and drive to the furthest western point of the island, to the most rugged section of the coast. The car strained up the small dirt road that twisted along the line of the sea, as the sun fell on the churning water far below. The cloudless sky was a pale china blue. When they left the car to view the landscape, the sea looked like limitless fabric, laid out and moving as if beneath its surface a powerful animal thrashed. Stephanie raised her hand to protect her eyes from the glare.
You may wonder how I knew about the cliffs and that day, how I could see so clearly the sun, the mist rising from the sea. You see, I returned a few years later, to the very spot where they had stood. It was land that had not changed much in thousands of years, in spite of being assaulted continuously by wind.
You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? It’s a common enough story, something you’d read in a novel. Of course the question through all this was: Why did he not love her? Why when he saw her face, so smooth and her eyes dark and shining, or when he saw her body, a gift she proffered, her breasts, her long legs, narrow waist, why was he not moved to love, not touched by her nakedness and beauty? And why—the most perplexing of questions—did he love me?
X
Amy put the journal down. There it was. What was unknown when she first encountered Frances standing on the deck of the ocean liner, looking out as the city slid by.
Costa came to her table and asked if she wanted anything else and Amy asked for a coffee. Over the past week, she had come to love the Cretan coffee which tasted so much like rich chocolate. She glanced at the shoreline as a group of children played in the surf with Costa’s dog, which was barking and jumping at the waves. One of boys who was chasing the dog and laughing caught her attention, and she thought he looked like the boy who now lived with her husband. A coldness came over her, even though the day was warm, even though she was sitting before an idyllic scene, the blue sea, the flawless sky, the children and the playing dog. And she pulled her sweater around her, looked out squinting into the sun and back to the grounds remaining at the bottom of her cup, a muddy, bitter sludge.
XI
W
hen he found the perfect spot, where only the glaring sun was witness, and where the cliff was sharp and high above the sea, he pushed her from behind, maintaining pressure as her shoes scuffed the loose rocks, until with a final shove she was gone. It was as if the air she fell through opened and shut behind her, so clean was her disappearance. He stood silent for a moment looking out at the sky, and then returned to the car, driving quickly to the nearest house, trying to explain to the farmer between gasps that his wife had fallen.
They never found the body, but she died there, I have no doubt. He told me how she tried to twist around to grab him but was unable, that her feet were off the ground and she was kicking stones over the cliff. He told me how moments before she had been laughing and running before him. He told me he did it for me, for us.
But I knew this, I knew what we would do for each other, what we had done, how I introduced them at the library, and how I told her about him, and coached him on how to interest her, what to say and how to not appear anxious. I’d tell her about his liaisons with other women to make her think he was unavailable, a condition Stephanie always found irresistible. I think she knew that I loved him and that piqued her interest further. I researched where the coastlines of Greece were the most rugged and steep.
I suppose he loved me because we were so much alike, we both spent our time among those people smiling and hating, and yet those people, as we thought of them, are who we are now. Quite the irony, that. Some people would say that living off of someone else’s money, living well because of the deceit of our actions would lead to a life of regret and unhappiness. Don’t believe them.
XII
“Costa, tell me this,” Amy said during the last meal she would have in his restaurant. “What is the coastline like further west from here? I mean, are there any hotels or houses?”
“That is a funny question,” he said, smiling. Another waiter was working in the restaurant on this day and Amy had noticed Costa’s attention was diverted, that he was jumpy and anxious to seat people who approached the restaurant.
“Well,” Amy said, “I read it was pretty rocky with cliffs and I just wondered if anyone has built there.”
“It is dangerous, but very, very beautiful.” A couple came to the seaside entrance and he left Amy to seat them and did not return for another ten minutes. She picked up one of the novels she kept in her bag, but her thoughts kept returning to Frances and Alec.
When Costa came back he said, “I want to build there someday.”
“I was thinking of going to see it, of maybe renting a car,” she said, “but my time here is coming to an end.”
A patron called him over with a request and he left Amy. He works hard, she thought, with little reward. Looking back to her book she caught sight of the silver brooch; the ruby glinting blood red, the colour deeply beautiful, and she touched the gem with something akin to affection.
As she entered her hotel room the telephone was ringing, the first time since she arrived that it had rung. It was her husband calling from Canada, and she thought as he spoke how his voice had already lost some of its familiarity. He told her there were papers at the lawyer’s office waiting for her signature and asked when she would return. She fingered the brooch and moved to the window.
After a moment of silence when Amy wondered if their connection had been lost, he said, “You know before Tom left for university, he wouldn’t even meet my girlfriend.”
“Well, that’s his choice, isn’t it?” Amy said and thought of her son the last time she’d seen him, how he shrugged off her embrace and told her not to worry about him alone in Edmonton. She moved the curtain to see the line of stores and restaurant across the boulevard where the children were still playing.
“I know, I know,” he said. “It’s hard, that’s all.” The dog joined the children, barking and running into the waves. “So, how is it there? As beautiful as you thought?”
Amy saw Costa emerge from the walkway by the side of the restaurant. He stretched, looked from side to side and seeing the dog, called him, slapping his thigh. She stepped closer to the window. A glare from a truck windshield flashed a sudden spear of light into the room that for a moment blinded Amy so that she turned her head away and said, “Oh yes, it’s even more beautiful than I’d imagined.”
Toadhead
The year I turned forty-nine, I lived alone in a house that had been built over a hundred years before, a large house, converted to small apartments. I’d lived there for almost seven years, the years after my marriage ended, when I moved back to Ottawa from the small town where my son was born and raised. My kitchen window looked out onto an alley and a courtyard with a disarray of rickety staircases, lawn chairs and clotheslines heavy with sheets and towels flapping wild in an inconstant wind.
I worked as an assistant to the communication department of a government research institute, and so Saturday or Sunday were the only days I could linger over a coffee and newspaper and watch the morning light enter the kitchen, a light that outside edged the fences, stairways and clotheslines, stitching the yard wall to wall. On the ground floor lived a woman not much younger than my mother and I’d see her sometimes sitting in a lazy-boy under the light of a floor lamp, the television on, and I wished it could be my own mother, who now lived in a nursing home where I visited most nights.
Although small, my living room had a working fireplace, and there were leaded glass panes in my dining room window, details that endeared the apartment to me and so over the years I grew very fond of the place. Where I worked, in contrast to my apartment, was a jumble of offices and labs off long hallways, stacked with files on cabinets, papers teetering on desks beside computers and lab benches, the rooms full of the sound of talk, of phones ringing and printers humming.
One morning, Irene, the receptionist, a woman who’d worked there for over twenty years and whose talk was propelled by twenty years of grievances, informed me by way of a yellow sticky note pasted on my door that I’d received a phone call. It turned out that the vaguely familiar name belonged to an old boyfriend, someone I met when I was thirteen and he sixteen. The day we met he’d worn a black leather jacket and smoke from the cigarette between his lips spiraled before his face and dirty blond hair. My mother had seen him in front of the house smoking and said she hoped he wasn’t waiting for me, but by then I’d become expert at avoiding her, at escaping to my room upstairs where I’d dry my hair straight and apply black eye makeup and pink lipstick.
In broad strokes, during our phone conversation, I discovered what he’d been doing in the intervening years (investment banking, raising two children, living part of the year in a Florida condo) and as we spoke, Paul, a co-worker, appeared before me. He gestured if I’d like to join him for coffee, and I placed the phone against my shoulder and said, “This may take awhile, you better go without me.”
“I’ll pick you up at lunch then.”
Paul lived in the suburbs, had lived there most of his adult life, with his wife and children. I learnt from our lunch conversation that his routine centered around Karen, his youngest child, and her assorted sports now that his other two children were at university. The year before, at our Christmas party, I’d met his wife, a short, placid woman, with cropped grey hair, who spoke of her church group, and seemed to me unsuited to Paul. At work he was normally quiet but when he befriended you, as he had me, his talk became spiked with jokes and we often spent our breaks in humorous awe at the absurdity of our workplace and some of our co-workers.
A few hours later when Paul returned to my office, he said, “Who was on the phone?”
“An old boyfriend.”
“And what does he want?”
“Who knows?”
“So, lunch?” Eating in the cafeteria meant taking an elevator to the basement and walking along hallways full of pipes, tubes and thick bands of wires, hallways that always reminded me of the inner workings of some mec
hanical and sloppy brain. Two women ran the cafeteria, which was one of a series for the campus where we worked, and they scurried behind the counters like obedient rodents wearing thick padded shoes and hair nets. Paul was one of their favourite clients and they’d often give him a cookie or muffin without charge when he teased them.
“Well, there she is,” he said to the shorter of the two, a blonde woman in her late thirties who had a high bosom, stocky legs in white hose and a wide attractive smile, which she displayed after Paul spoke.
On our way to the table I said, “She has a huge crush on you, you know”.
“You’re nuts.”
“And you like it, don’t you? You like the attention.” He put his tray on the table and when he smiled, I said, “It makes you pretty pathetic, you know.”
The cafeteria was a large room with the kitchen at one end separated by blue and white metal dividers. Tables rimmed the room, one side had high windows that looked out, ground level, at the parking lot and the other wall had nondescript artwork on what looked like thick cardboard. The scenes of sailing ships on a blue sea, crashing waves on a shoreline, or a cabin in a forest had been there for years, certainly since I had started working there. All were splattered with food. “How is it possible that food gets on those god-awful paintings?” Paul said. “Do people fling it around? Or hit them with their spoons?”
“Possibly, or maybe it’s when they vomit, you know it splashes up.”
“You really have a weird imagination,” he said. “People don’t know that about you, they think you’re sweet.”
“Ask my ex-husband about that.” The soup was thick as pudding and tasted like hot flour.
The View From the Lane and Other Stories Page 16