The Box Garden (9 page)

From Winnipeg I phone Seth. There is only twenty minutes, but luckily the call goes right through. And it’s a good connection.

“Hello. Is that you, Doug?”

“Yes. Charleen! Where are you?”

“Winnipeg. We’ve just got a few minutes, but I thought I’d phone and see how everything was.”

“Everything’s fine here. We’re all getting along fine.”

“Is Seth there?” I ask, and suddenly realize that it is two hours earlier on the coast; Seth might be asleep.

But surprisingly Doug says, “Sure he’s here. Hang on a minute, Char, and I’ll get him.”

I hang on for more than a minute, two minutes, unbelievable! Here I am calling long distance. Long distance—I remember how my mother used to say those two words, her voice stricken, worried and worshipful at the same time.

“Hello.”

“Seth,” I say, “where were you just now?”

“I was just here,” he says maddeningly.

“Well, how are you getting along?”

“Fine.”

“How come you’re up so early on a Saturday?”

“I just woke up now.”

“And you’re getting along fine?” I ask again.

“Yeah, just fine.”

“You sound all out of breath.”

“Oh? I guess I’m just surprised to hear from you.”

“I had a few minutes in Winnipeg and I thought I’d just make sure everything was okay.”

“How are you?”

“Oh, fine. We get in tomorrow night. Aunt Judith will already be there. She’ll probably meet us. At least I think so.”

Silence from Vancouver.

“Hello, Seth. Can you hear me? Are you there?”

“I’m still here. I can hear fine.”

“Good. Well, I’d better go. Just phone me if you need anything, okay?”

“Okay.”

“You’ve got the number?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I guess I’d better say good-bye.”

“Good-bye.”

Two years ago when Seth started the orthodonture treatment he was advised to give up his tuba temporarily; for the year and a half while the bands were on his teeth he played the double bass. He was good at it; everyone remarked about how quickly he picked it up.

We bought the double bass third-hand through the want ads; we got it cheap because there was no case. It’s a big, waxy, humming buzzard of an instrument, and because its bulk so nearly approximates that of a human being, I soon began to think of it as a sort of half-person, a rather chuckly, middle-aged woman, rather like me in fact.

One day Seth forgot to take it to school and he phoned me between classes asking if I could drop it off. I took it on the bus, feeling enormously proud of her polished, nut-brown hippiness, her deep-throated good nature, the way the sun struck off gleaming streaks on her lovely sides. Seth waited for me on the steps outside the school, frowning and a little anxious that I might be late. When he saw me getting off the bus he jumped up and ran to meet me, taking the instrument out of my arms, whirling about with it and kissing the air about its bridge. I can never get that picture out of my mind, how extraordinarily and purely happy he looked at that instant.

But the minute he had the bands off his teeth he went back to playing the tuba. I can’t understand it. A tuba is such an awkward machine with its valves and convolutions; it’s such an ugly brassy armload, and I don’t understand what Seth likes in the choking, grunting noise that comes out of it.

There seems something rather perverse about his preference. He explains that he likes the tuba better because it’s his voice that makes the sounds; the double bass has a voice of its own—it’s just a question of letting it out, something anyone can do. I don’t think he’s touched the bass since. It stands, serene as ever, in a corner of his bedroom. He keeps a beach towel draped over it to keep off the dust, but no one loves it anymore.

Sometimes I think there’s something symbolic about it, but symbolism is such an impertinence, the sort of thing the “pome people” might contrive. (God knows how easily it’s manufactured by those who turn themselves into continuously operating sensitivity machines.) Of course, symbols have their uses. But something—my cramped Scarborough girlhood no doubt—ties me to the heaviness of facts. Tubas and double basses are not symbols but facts, facts which can be—which must be—assimilated like any of the other mysterious facts of existence.

As the train moves closer to Toronto I decide I must warn Eugene a little about my mother. “She’s always been a difficult person,” I say.

“How do you mean, difficult?”

“Well, to begin with—you’ll notice this right away—she’s never been what you’d call demonstrative.”

“But she must have loved you. You and your sister?”

“It’s hard to explain,” I say. Hard because she had loved us but with an angry, depriving love which, even after all these years, I don’t understand. The lye-bite of her private rancour, her bitter shrivelling scoldings. When she scrubbed our faces it was with a single, hurting swipe. When we fell down and scraped our knees and elbows she said, “that will teach you to watch where you’re going.” Her love, if that’s what you call it, was primitive, scalding, shorn of kindness. I can’t explain it to Eugene; instead, I give him an example.

“When she brushed our hair in the morning, Judith’s and mine, when she brushed our hair ...”

“Yes?”

“She yanked it. Hard. It really hurt. She’d catch us in our bedroom, just before we left for school. She’d be holding the brush in her hand. When I think about it I can still feel her yanking my head back.”

Eugene listens without comment.

I shrug, afraid I’ve betrayed a streak of self-pity. “That’s just the way she is, and don’t ask me why. I don’t understand it. So how could you.”

I had forgotten about the thousand miles of bush between Winnipeg and Toronto. But here it is. Eugene and I are sitting high up in the Vistadome with nothing but curved glass separating us from turquoise lakes, whorled trees, the torn, reddened sky and, here and there, clumps of Indian cabins. We’re sitting close to the front and so high up that we can overlook our whole train from end to end. We seem to vibrate to a different rhythm up here; the side-to-side swaying is gone; from this position we glide on cables of pure ozone. And music pours sweetly out of the chromium walls: Some Enchanted Evening. The hills are alive with the Sound of Music. Dancing in the Dark. Temptation—a tango—
You came, I was alone, I should have known you were temptation.
Eugene reaches over and takes my hand.

We met two years ago through mutual friends, the Freehorns, at a small dinner party in late May. It had been an utterly respectable occasion, in every way the reverse of my meeting with Watson which had occurred in a run-down neighbourhood drugstore, a meeting which was described in those days as a pick-up.
Watson was someone who picked up people. I was someone who had allowed myself to be picked up; was that what doomed us?

But the meeting between Eugene and me was impeccably prearranged, although Bea Freehorn assured me before the party that even though she was inviting a single man, I was not to suspect her of matchmaking. “There’s nothing that burns me up more than being accused of fixing someone up,” she told me over the phone. “But Eugene’s a pet, you’ll like him. Merv thinks he’s terrific.”

Merv and Bea are old friends, so old that they date from the days when I was still married to Watson; the four of us, in times which now seem impossibly idyllic, used to take Sunday picnics up to the mountain; I would bring potato salad and a cake and Bea always brought salami and corned beef and sometimes cold chicken. Now they give dinner parties; I’ve tried to fix the year when they stopped inviting me to dinner and started inviting me to dinner parties. Sometime when Merv was between assistant and associate in the Law School. Or maybe after they moved into the new house, yes, I think that was it. They have a patio overlooking the ocean where Bea likes to serve dinner on tiny lantern-lit tables. She is an accomplished cook, and I would never turn down one of her dinner invitations with or without a suspicion of matchmaking.

“Actually,” Bea had confided, “you and Eugene have something in common.”

“What?” I asked cautiously.

“You were both married for exactly eight years.”

It’s hard sometimes to tell when Bea is being serious. I waited for the rough curl of her laughter but heard only earnest confidence. “He’s really had a rough time of it. His wife got screwed up with Women’s Lib and just took the two kids one day and moved out. He has the boys on weekends, nice kids, but she won’t take a penny from him, so in a way he’s lucky. Anyway, he’s a nice guy.”

Nice. Yes, I could see that right away when I met him. Nice, meaning polite, presentable, moderate, inquiring and almost sloshily good-natured. He arrived a little late with his right hand freshly bandaged and was apologetically unable to shake hands with the Freehorns, the Stevens, the Folkstones, or with me.

“I was cutting off a piece of beef at noon today,” he told us sadly. “The whole plate slipped suddenly and there I was with a bloody gash.”

“Oh, Eugene,” Bea crooned kindly, “did you need stitches?”

“A few,” he said bravely. “The whole thing’s been so damned stupid.”

I was prepared to dislike him. First for so perfectly fulfilling the role of the inept and picturesque bachelor who couldn’t make a sandwich without sawing through his hand. And second for being a self-pitying poseur, and now monopolizing the conversation with his idiotic stitches.

“How are you going to be able to work?” Merv asked him conversationally, and, turning to me, he explained that Eugene was an orthodontist and thus required the use of his hands.

Eugene shrugged and smiled somewhat goofily, “I’ll take a week off. There’s nothing else to do really.”

“What about all your appointments?” Gordon Stevens asked.

“I’ll have to get Mrs. Ingalls to cancel everything Monday morning.”

“What a shame,” Bea mourned, “what a rotten shame. But look, Eugene, let Merv get you something to drink. That hand must be painful.”

“It is a bit,” he admitted.

Did I detect a hint of a whine? Was this ridiculous tooth straightener trying to solicit sympathy? If so, I was not prepared to give it. No wonder his wife ditched him, the big baby. I sipped my gin and tonic sullenly.

“Merv says you’re a poet,” he said to me later, sitting beside me at one of the little tables along with Gord Stevens and Clara Folkstone. I gave him a long look; with enormous difficulty he was eating his stuffed artichoke with his left hand.

“Yes,” I said knowing that he was about to tell me he never read poetry.

“I can’t pretend to know much about poetry,” he said. “Except the usual stuff we had at school.”

“That’s all right,” I said socially. “It’s a sort of minority interest. Like lacrosse.”

I had dressed for this evening with deliberate declassé nonchalance, aware that Bea expects me to contribute a faint whiff of bohemia to her parties; I wore a badly-cut gypsy skirt and black satin peasant blouse, both bought at an Anglican Church rummage sale. Fortunately Bea’s expectations conform to what I can afford. I had also brought my special party personality, the rough-ribbed humorous persona which I had devised for myself after Watson left me. I earn my invitations and even for an old friend like Bea Freehorn I knew better than to sulk all evening. So I smiled hard at Eugene as Bea brought round the veal fillets.