The Progress of Love (25 page)

“He married her for her money,” I said to MaryBeth.

MaryBeth wanted to know what he looked like.

“Like something dug up out of a bog,” I said. But that was Aunt Ena’s description after she first laid eyes on Mr. Cryderman. I repeated it because I liked the sound of it. I didn’t really find it apt. It was true that Mr. Cryderman was thin, tall and thin, and that he had a sallow complexion. But he didn’t have a moldy or sickly look. In fact, he had a kind of light-boned, sharp-featured, crisp good looks, a kind of looks very popular at the time. A pencil-line mustache, cool squinting eyes, a sarcastic half-smile.

“Like a snake in the grass,” I amended. “But she is out of her mind in love with him.” I acted out their daily reunion, smacking my lips and flinging my arms about.

Mrs. Cryderman told Mr. Cryderman that I read like a demon and was a genius at history. This was because I had straightened out some confusion of hers in connection with a historical novel she was trying to read. I had explained how Peter the Great was connected to Catherine the Great.

“Is that so?” said Mr. Cryderman. His accent made him sound both softer and meaner than a Canadian. “Who is your favorite writer?”

“Dostoyevsky,” I said, or thought I said.

“Dostoy-vetsky,” said Mr. Cryderman thoughtfully. “What is your favorite book by him?”

I was too flustered to notice the imitation.

“
The Brothers Karamazov
,” I said. That was the only book by Dostoyevsky that I had read. I had read it through the night in the cold of the back bedroom, in my haste and greed skipping a lot of the Grand Inquisitor and other parts where I had got bogged down.

“Which is your favorite brother?” said Mr. Cryderman, smiling as if he had got me into a corner.

“Mitya,” I said. By this time, I wasn’t so nervous and would have liked to go on, explaining why this was so—that Alyosha was too angelic and Ivan too intellectual, and so on. On the way home, I imagined that I had done this, and that while I spoke, the expression on Mr. Cryderman’s face had changed to one of respect and delicate chagrin. Then I realized the mistake I had made, in pronunciation.

I didn’t get a chance to go on, because Mrs. Cryderman cried out from the sofa, “Favorites, favorites! Who is everybody’s favorite big old bloated old pregnant lady? That’s what I want to know!”

However much I mocked the Crydermans to MaryBeth, I wanted something from them. Attention. Recognition. I liked Mrs. Cryderman’s saying I was a genius at history, even though I knew it was a silly thing to say. I would have valued what he said more. I thought that he looked down on this town and everybody in it. He didn’t care what they thought of him for not shovelling his walk. I wanted to snip one little hole in his contempt.

Just the same, he had to be called honey-boy, and submit to those kisses.

MaryBeth had new things to tell me, too. Beatrice had a boyfriend, and hoped to be engaged. MaryBeth said they were going at it hot and heavy.

Beatrice’s boyfriend was an apprentice barber. He visited her in the afternoons, when she got home from her shift at the hospital and there was a lull in barbershop business. The other girls who lived in the house were at work then, and MaryBeth and I would
not have been there, either, if we had been tactful enough to loiter around the school, or go for Cokes, or spend time looking in store windows. But MaryBeth insisted on making a beeline for the rooming house.

We would find Beatrice making up the bed. She took all the covers off and tucked in the sheet with a professional briskness. Then she laid an absorbent cotton pad across the sheet at a strategic place. I was reminded of the days when I used to sleep shamefully over rubber, being an occasional bed wetter.

Now she replaced the top covers, smoothed and tidied them, hiding the secret. She plumped up the pillows, turned a corner of the top sheet down over the quilt. A queasy feeling of childhood lust came back to me, a recollection of bedclothes intimacies. Rough blankets, comforting flannelette sheets, secrets.

Down the hall to the bathroom went Beatrice, having to fix up the appropriate part of herself as she had fixed the bed. She had a serious, dutiful look on her face, a look of housewifely preoccupation. She still had not spoken one word to us.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if she went ahead and did it right in front of us,” said MaryBeth loudly as we passed the bathroom door on our way downstairs. The water was running. What exactly did Beatrice do? I thought it involved sponges.

We sat on the veranda steps. The swing had been taken down for the winter and not been put back yet.

“She has no shame,” MaryBeth said. “And I have to sleep in the same bed. She thinks if she puts the pad over the sheet it’s all right. She stole that pad from the hospital. You could never trust her, even when she was little. Once, we had a fight and she said, ‘Let’s make up, shake hands,’ and when I took her hand to shake, she had a baby toad in it and the toad had gone to the bathroom on her.”

The snow was not quite gone; a nippy wind was blowing the smell of swamps and creeks and floodwaters into town. But the barber’s apprentice hadn’t bothered to put on a coat. He came hurrying along the alley in his white smock, head down, purposefully. He wasn’t prepared to see us.

“Hi there!” he said with false assurance, nervous jocularity.

MaryBeth wouldn’t answer him, and I couldn’t, either, out of loyalty. We didn’t get up, but shifted apart, giving him just enough room to go up the steps. I listened for, but couldn’t hear, the opening and closing of the bedroom door.

“They might as well be two dogs,” MaryBeth said. “Two dogs doing it.”

I thought about what was going on at that very moment. The greeting, the look exchanged, the removal of clothing. In what order? Accompanied by what words and caresses? Would they be frenzied or methodical? Would they roll on the bed half-undressed, or proceed as at the doctor’s? I thought the latter way would be more like them.

Take that off. Yes. Now lie down. Open your legs. Calm orders, dumb obedience. Beatrice glazed, submissive. The barber’s apprentice, that scrawny, blotchy-necked fellow, grown imperious, ready to wield his perverse power. Now. Yes. Now.

“One time, a boy asked me to do it,” MaryBeth said. “I nearly got him expelled.” She told me how, in Grade 7, a boy had passed her a note that said, “Do you want to F.?” and she had shown the note to the teacher.

“Somebody wants me to do it,” I said. I was very surprised at myself. I kept my eyes down and did not look at MaryBeth. Who? she said, and what did he say exactly, and where did he say it? When? Was it anybody in our class? Why hadn’t I told her?

She bumped down to the step below me, so that she could look into my face. She put her hands on my knees. “We promised we’d tell each other everything,” she said.

I shook my head.

“It hurts my feelings a lot you haven’t told me.”

I rubbed my lips together as if to hold the secret in. “Actually, he’s in love with me,” I said.

“Jessie! Tell me!”

She promised me the use of her Eversharp pencil until the end of the school year. I did not respond. She said I could use her fountain pen as well. Her Eversharp pencil and her fountain pen, the set.

I had been planning to tease her for a little longer, then to
tell her that it was all a joke. I did not even have anybody’s name in my head, in the beginning. I did now, but it was too outrageous. I couldn’t believe that I would ever say it.

“Jessie, I’ll give you a bangle. Not lend. I said
give
. I’ll give you whichever bangle you want and you can keep it.”

“If I was going to tell his name, I wouldn’t do it for a bangle,” I said.

“I’ll swear to God I won’t tell. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“Just swear to God.”

“I will. I swear to God, Jessie. I’ve sworn to God.”

“Mr. Cryderman,” I said softly. I felt wonderfully lightened, not burdened, by my lie. “It’s him.”

MaryBeth took her hands off my knees and sat up straight. “He’s old,” she said. “You said he was ugly! He’s married!”

“I never said ugly,” I said. “He’s only thirty-three.”

“You don’t even like him!”

“Sometimes when you fall in love, it starts out that way.”

Once, I knew an old woman who said to me, when talking about her life, that she had spent three years having an affair with Robert Browning. She was not in the least senile; she was a very competent and straightforward old woman. She didn’t say she loved Browning’s writing, or spent all her time reading about him. She didn’t say she had fantasies. “Oh, yes,” she said, “and then there was the three years’ affair I had with Robert Browning.” I waited for her to laugh or add some little explanatory word, but she did not do so. I have to think, then, that the affair she conducted in her imagination was so serious and strenuous that she forbade herself to describe it as imaginary.

The affair I conducted that spring with Mr. Cryderman—in my head, and in front of MaryBeth—may not have been that important in my life, but it kept me busy. There was no more sense of drift and boredom, when MaryBeth and I were together. I had to keep arranging and rearranging things, then fit them into place by means of the bits of information I chose to
give
out. I consummated the affair but did not tell her, and was glad afterward because
I decided to unconsummate it. I couldn’t adequately imagine the sequence of moves or what would be said afterward. I didn’t at all mind the lying. Once I had taken the plunge into falsehood—by saying Mr. Cryderman’s name—falsehood felt wonderfully comfortable.

It wasn’t just by what I told, but by how I looked, that I dramatized what was going on. I did some contrary things. I didn’t pull my belts tight and make up my face and display myself as a youthful temptress. Instead, I took to wearing my hair in braids wrapped around my head, and I left off rouge and lipstick, though I still powdered heavily to make myself look pale. I went to school in a baggy crepe blouse of Aunt Ena’s. I told MaryBeth that Mr. Cryderman had asked me to dress like this and braid my hair. He could not bear the thought of anyone else looking at my hair or seeing the outline of my breasts. He suffered from his burden of love. I, too, suffered. I bowed my shoulders; I had a chastened air. The passions are no light matter, was my message to MaryBeth. Guilt and misgiving and a glowering desire must be seen as my daily companions.

Mr. Cryderman’s, as well. In my imagination, he grew bold. He fondled and whispered, then rebuked himself, groaned, became devout, and kissed my eyelids.

What about the real Mr. Cryderman? Did all this make me tremble when I heard him at the door, lie in wait for him, hope for a sign? Not in the least. When he began to play his role in my imagination, he faded in reality. I no longer hoped for an interesting conversation, or even a nod in the direction of my existence. In my mind, I had improved his looks somewhat—given him a healthier color, rolled back his customary slight sneer to expose a gloomy tenderness. I avoided looking at him in the flesh, so that I would not have to change him all over again.

MaryBeth probed for details but took no pleasure in any of this. She urged me never to surrender. “Couldn’t you tell Mrs. Cryderman on him?” she said.

“It would kill her. She might die anyway when she has the baby.”

“Would you get married if she did?”

“I’m underage.”

“He could wait. If he loves you like he says. He’d need somebody to look after the baby. Would he get all her money?”

Mention of the baby made me think of something real, and unpleasant and embarrassing, that had happened recently at the Crydermans’. Mrs. Cryderman had called me to come and see the baby kicking her. She was lying on the sofa with her robe pulled up, a cushion covering the most private part of her. “There, see!” she cried, and I saw it, not a flutter on the surface but an underground shifting and rolling of the whole blotchy mound. Her navel stuck out like a cork ready to pop. My arms and forehead broke out in a sweat. I felt a hard ball of disgust pushing up in my throat. She laughed and the cushion fell off. I ran to the kitchen.

“Jessie, what are you scared of? I don’t think one of them ever came out that way yet!”

Two more scenes at the Crydermans’.

Mr. Cryderman is home early. He and Mrs. Cryderman are together in the living room when I arrive after school. Mrs. Cryderman still keeps the curtains closed all day, though it’s spring outside, hot May weather. She says this is so nobody can look in and see the shape she’s in.

I come in out of the hot, bright afternoon and find the incense burning in the stuffy, curtained room and the two pale Crydermans giggling and having drinks. He is sitting on the sofa with her feet in his lap.

“Time to join the celebration!” says Mr. Cryderman. “It’s our farewell party! Our fare-thee-well party, Jessie. Farewell, begone, goodbye!”

“Control yourself!” says Mrs. Cryderman, beating her bare heels against his legs. “We aren’t gone yet. We have to wait till the monstrous infant is born.”

Drunk, I think. I had often seen them drinking, but up until now had not been able to spot any interesting alterations in behavior.

“Eric is going to write his book,” says Mrs. Cryderman.

“Eric is going to write his book,” says Mr. Cryderman, in a silly high-pitched voice.

“You are!” says Mrs. Cryderman, drumming her heels some more. “And we are getting out of here the instant the monster is born.”

“Is it really a monster?” says Mr. Cryderman. “Has it got two heads? Can we put it in the freak show and make a lot of money?”

“We don’t need money.”

“I do.”

“I wish you’d cut that out. I don’t know if it’s got two heads, but it feels as if it’s got fifty feet. It frightened Jessie the other day.”

She tells him how I ran.

“You have to get used to these things, Jessie,” says Mr. Cryderman. “Girls in some parts of the world have a baby or two already by the time they’re your age. You can’t cheat Nature. Little brown girls, practically babies themselves, they’ve got babies.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” says Mrs. Cryderman. “Jessie, be a lamb. You know what gin is, don’t you? Put a little gin in this glass and fill it up with orange juice, so I can get my vitamin C.”