She has to pack, she needs to begin, she needs help, but she won’t be able to rely on Judy to help her because the van der Meers have cleverly gone camping in Algonquin Park and won’t be back till the end of next week. But at
this moment her phone, as if it plans to rescue her, starts to ring.
She knows his voice at once when he says her name.
“Hello, Tony,” she says.
He tells her he saw her yesterday, as he was driving along Wilbrod Street.
“Was I walking along looking terribly grim?”
“I couldn’t quite tell. But then I wasn’t taking notes, I was just driving by.”
She smiles the smile she wants him to hear in her voice. “It’s just that it makes me anxious to have people see me when I don’t know they are seeing me. Even when I’m dead I don’t want people to look at me,” she tells him. “I want my coffin to be closed.”
“But Claire. How could this matter? You’ll be
dead
.”
“My self-consciousness is posthumous. Or will be posthumous. Or whatever the correct tense is.”
“So,” he says. “As a matter of fact, it
did
seem to me that you were looking quite grim. Which is why I’ve decided to call you and invite you out to dinner tonight.”
She says she would love to, but the problem is she’s moving away and her apartment is in chaos. “The movers are already coming the day after tomorrow.”
“Where are you going?”
“Just to Toronto.”
“Oh,” he says, and his voice even sounds a little flatteringly forlorn.
“If, on the other hand, you’d like to come and help me
pack
—”
“Sorry, but I can’t.” And they both laugh when he says he has just this moment remembered that he has other plans.
On her last day at work there are several new patients: a hypertensive woman whose embroidered jacket has droopy pockets; a man with a neck injury; a bitterly slender woman whose eyes shine with a frightened glitter as she holds her baby daughter tight in her arms. As much as possible, Claire has to try to keep her own eyes free of pity when she talks to this woman: she has already seen her blood tests and knows she has leukemia. There’s also a musician, a Miss Middlemiss, a morosely dignified woman caped in an assortment of paisley shawls and mauve and fuchsia silk scarves. She has had a colostomy — the smell she brings with her into the examining room is so distinctive: a smell that isn’t so much fecal as it’s the sweetish sick smell of cooked blueberries beginning to go bad. Wrapping the blood pressure cuff around the musician’s disciplined but loosely age-freckled arm, Claire vows to herself to swallow (every morning, do not forget this) her flax seeds and bran.
On her way home from work, she walks along the canal. Final walk home. Last rites and last nights. She breathes in the night air and looks out over the black water at the way the warm wind is distorting and multiplying its lights.
The night before the movers are to come she sorts and packs until close to sunrise, although the dawn looks dark. At ten to five she’s still sneaking peeks at articles in magazines she’s been planning to read some day when she gets a free moment, she still
can hardly bear the thought that she won’t ever read them, that she’ll have to die without reading them when in fact there might be something in them, some information that could change her life, even save it, but now she’ll just have to let them go, although maybe just
these
three, these three she should keep, how much weight can they add to the official ballast after all? And she tosses them into a box, then sets the alarm for eight and washes a Valium down with a teacup of cold water.
The movers, three fat men from Hull, arrive at four-thirty, their last call for the day, and as Claire runs down to meet them, she prays for them to like her so that they won’t overcharge her. But with each unready room they enter, she can see her stock falling with them. She needs to appease them, serve them something, and so a little after five, when she’s scooping vitamin bottles and debris off the two bottom shelves of one of the kitchen cupboards and hears footsteps behind her, she calls out in her not very good French that there’s beer in the fridge.
But a voice that’s not one of the movers’ voices careens into a little dance step behind her. “C’est si bon …” and she turns to see Tony O’Bois.
“Thought I’d just drop by, see how things are coming along.” He hugs her, but it’s a utilitarian hug, while from his voice she can feel his gaze being aimed over the top of her hair: “So show me what still needs to be done then.”
And so now there’s nothing left to do but drop the keys for the van der Meers in through the mail slot of their door — it’s a
moment, a small moment in history,
goodbye, goodbye
— then drive out to the road that runs along the canal. The sky has turned dark by this time, stormy, there’s a big wind building in the trees down by the water.
The aroma of fried bananas and the crash of surfy music — surf and some kind of tinkling, imitation Bach — greet them as they come into a stern but fragrant vegetarian restaurant a block from the river, and as they are helping themselves to casseroles of curried tofu and potatoes, and to tofu quiche, and to salads containing pickled beets and tofu chunks, Tony whispers to her, “Does
everything
here have tofu in it?”
“Everything.”
Squeezing past the long refectory tables (with only a few late diners finishing up their tea) they also pass by the worthy smell of platters of sliced rye bread, sliced whole-grain bread, a dried-out smell reminiscent of something unpleasant. Sanctimony, perhaps, or chicken feed.
“Even the pumpkin pie?”
Even the pumpkin pie. But they both help themselves to wide slices of it.
And then while they’re eating it, Tony asks her if it’s good to be getting away from this smug little town.
“In some ways.” She takes a neat bite of her pie. “In many ways,” she says.
He leans back in his chair. “Tell me about the West.”
She tries to think of some aspect of the West that would especially please him. “Well, it’s sunny a lot,” she tells him. “It’s very sunlit, very wide-open country. There’s hardly ever a grey day, it’s either sunlight or storms. And the storms can be shockingly violent.”
“Tornado country,” he says, in the tender voice of a foreigner.
“Yes.”
“It sounds pretty amazing.”
“It is,” she says. “Pretty amazing and boring.” But then she talks about elk ranches and a pelican colony her brothers liked to go to on Worthington Lake.
“Pelican colony or penal colony?”
“Pelican colony.”
“Pelicans in work gangs. With their big yellow shovels.”
She laughs, although she’s afraid that any minute now she might spin right out of control. But now Tony is talking about his own childhood: all the towns he lived in, being an army brat, his father a captain in the Falklands war. The stints in Germany and Cyprus.
“This must be why you are as you are.”
“And so how am I then?”
“Well, you’re very observant,” she tells him. “And very generous too, a generous listener.” But she finds herself hoping he won’t get withdrawn, now that she’s praised him so much. “A very open, observant, tolerant person.” She should stop right now, she shouldn’t say more. Men got anxious if you praised them too much, they thought it meant you weren’t attracted to them, they thought you were trying to make up for your lack of interest in them by saying something kind. “But I’m sorry, I know all this must sound very banal.”
“Not that banal.”
“And God knows, you’re not an egomaniac.”
“You don’t know me, love …” But then he says, “Tell me about the town you grew up in.”
“We actually lived out in the country. Almost halfway between Turtleford and St. Walburg. And the really big tourist attraction in St. Walburg was — and, God knows, probably still
is
— the end of the tracks …”
“The end of the tracks …”
“Yes,” she says. “You walk down to the end of the tracks, and then you actually do get to the actual end, the actual end of the steel. And then there is nothing. Or everything. Then there’s the world.”
“Do go on, Fräulein Vornoff. Please do tell me more about this nothing …”
But she can’t, this is not the way she can afford to let the evening come to an end, and so instead she says, “But the thing that fascinated me most about St. Walburg when I was a child was a house called the Catalogue House. It was a house completely constructed from a do-it-yourself kit ordered from the Eaton’s catalogue.”
This, she thinks, should be of interest to the historian in him, but he surprises her by saying, “You must remind me never to go there.” And when she laughs he surprises her again: “What about that shrink you were seeing? The psychodrama person?”
“That’s over now.”
“What
was
this guy anyway? Some kind of crazed flirt?”
She shakes her head to let him know she really can’t talk about it.
It’s a little after eleven when he drives her, in a light rain, to the bus terminal on Catherine Street. But in spite of the terminal’s
airiness she feels ill from the prospect of moving on, the transitory but deep humiliation of moving being not only a matter of strangers having the right to look in at her unready life, but also her sense of being fated, moved like a pawn across a bright and dangerous landscape. And she’s afraid then, that he’ll see the terminal as too sad a symbol of her diminished world, after all she’s not leaving the city by car or plane or even by train but by the most pathetically economical form of transportation, the way students or people who have failed in the world travel. And isn’t it possible that he (being the only one seeing her off) will conclude that she doesn’t even have any friends?
He buys her an apple and also a magazine for the trip, then as they’re waiting for the boarding time to be called out he flips the pages, makes snide remarks about the models. A male model dressed in a white linen suit and a white fedora is holding a glass of champagne in one hand while he gazes out over blue water. “He’s looking at the sea as if he wants to make love to it.”
But now the Toronto bus is boarding, then Tony is walking with her to the end of the queue, where at the last possible moment — the other passengers having by now all already boarded — he pulls her quickly to him to hold her face pressed against his buttons as if in forcing her to gaze into the view within the depths of his jacket, he’s sparing her a view of her even darker future. There’s then another small but interminable wait before the driver releases the brake, then the bus is backing out of the terminal while Tony continues to stand looking up at her window, holding up his hand in a clowny half-wave, and she waves back, trying not to let him know how much she can see that he’s trying not to look worried for her sake. Then, just
in time, she has an inspiration and holds up the page with the photograph of the man in the white fedora, and Tony smiles up at it and holds up his own invisible glass of champagne, using his free hand to shade his eyes against an imaginary sun, then the driver swings the bus away from him in the rain, they are out of the terminal, they’re on their way, her throat is aching, and in no time at all they’ve passed the final jumbles of lights and are already roaring out into deep country. She had hoped to leave early enough to see the bleached fields and dark trees, the distant hedged farms in the misty and slightly sinister light of dusk, but it’s by now after midnight and there’s only the endless rainy dark. How can she ever have imagined that she could live out in the country? If she moved out here — or to a place somewhere like here — she could no longer be the person she believes herself to be. And she thinks of all the despair out in the country: the abandoned, boarded-up barns and houses, the listless hearts of the towns, so many announcements of loss. She would have to buy herself a gun. And she would never sleep. Now it’s cities that feel safe to her. But in her childhood she was under the protection of her father and so was never afraid. Cities were the places that frightened her. Even little Saskatoon, which was really never much more than an overgrown town, with its fast-moving cars and its Hutterite cowboys looking like the cowboys in
High Noon
. One early evening the spring she turned fifteen, walking by the open door of a saloony bar stocked with red lamps and dark bottles, she saw a cowboy in a black Stetson and a long coat reaching down to the spurs on his high-heeled black boots, the reddish light turning the coat into an evil bronze taffeta raincoat. And in the summers, the
girls in their sleeveless blouses would pour out of the not-very-tall office towers at noontime, each girl with her shrill voice and her sexless little walk going nowhere in a bossy hurry, all the women who were charmers — all those opportunists of the voice, of the eyes — having long since made their clever escape to the cities.
T
he rain doesn’t stop until nearly sunrise, a hundred kilometres northeast of Toronto. But coming into the city isn’t a thrill on the bus, it’s not like coming in on the train, hugging the shoreline of the lake’s vast grey plain of water, instead it’s just grey city, poor city, grey city, poor city, until it’s all at once rich city, towers of black glass, lilac glass, gold glass, mirrored glass, all of it gleaming with a hallucinatory splendour after a night of no sleep.
The cabbie who holds open his taxi door for her as she’s on her way out of the terminal has an amused, lethal look. Long-nosed, early thirties.
“I’d like to go to the Polish district,” she tells him, but then can see that he is (with difficulty) repressing a smirk.
“On Roncie?”
“On Galley Avenue, close to a street called Roncesvalles.”
“In these parts, we call Roncesvalles Roncie,” he tells her. And on the way to Felix’s place on Galley Avenue, he calls back to her over a shoulder, “So how you think you gonna like the big city?”
“You can tell I’m not a native, then.”
“Sure,” he says, and she can see his eyes watching her eyes in the rear-view mirror. Then he says archly, “The Polish district.”
She looks out the window, smiling or almost smiling, but she keeps blacking out, just for brief instants. Here she is, in the huge and violent city. She asks him if he’s ever afraid, driving at night.