The Progress of Love (7 page)

“Mood elevator,” says Stella. “Mood elevator, going up!”

“I’m serious, Stella. Those pills are deadly.”

“That’s your affair.”

“Very funny.”

“I didn’t even mean it to be. Whenever something slips out like that, I always pretend I meant it, though. I’ll take all the credit I can get!”

These three people feel better at dinnertime than any of them might have expected. David feels better because he has remembered that there is a telephone booth across from the liquor store. Stella always feels better when she has cooked a meal and it has turned out so well. Catherine’s reasons for feeling better are chemical.

Conversation is not difficult. Stella tells stories that she has come across in doing research for her article, about wrecks on the Great Lakes. Catherine knows something about wrecks. She has a boyfriend—a former boyfriend—who is a diver. David is gallant enough to assert that he is jealous of this fellow, does not care to hear about his deep-water prowess. Perhaps this is the truth.

After dinner, David says he needs to go for a walk. Catherine tells him to go ahead. “Go on,” she says merrily. “We don’t need you here. Stella and I will
get
along fine without you!”
Stella wonders where this new voice of Catherine’s comes from, this pert and rather foolish and flirtatious voice. Drink wouldn’t do it. Whatever Catherine has taken has made her sharper, not blunter. Several layers of wispy apology, tentative flattery, fearfulness, or hopefulness have simply blown away in this brisk chemical breeze.

But when Catherine gets up and tries to clear the table it becomes apparent that the sharpening is not physical. Catherine bumps into a corner of the counter. She makes Stella think of an amputee. Not much cut off, just the tips of her fingers and maybe her toes. Stella has to keep an eye on her, relieving her of the dishes before they slide away.

“Did you notice the hair?” says Catherine. Her voice goes up and down like a Ferris wheel; it dips and sparkles. “He’s dyeing it!”

“David is?” says Stella, in genuine surprise.

“Every time he’d think of it, he’d tilt his head back, so you couldn’t get too close a look. I think he was afraid you’d say something. He’s slightly afraid of you. Actually, it looks very natural.”

“I really didn’t notice.”

“He started a couple of months ago. I said, ‘David, what does it matter—your hair was getting gray when I fell in love with you, do you think it’s going to bother me now?’ Love is strange, it does strange things. David is actually a sensitive person—he’s a vulnerable person.” Stella rescues a wineglass that is drooping from Catherine’s fingers. “It can make you mean. Love can make you mean. If you feel dependent on somebody, then you can be mean to them. I understand that in David.”

They drink mead at dinner. This is the first time Stella has tried this batch of homemade mead and she thinks now how good it was, dry and sparkling. It looked like champagne. She checks to see if there is any left in the bottle. About half a glass. She pours it out for herself, sets her glass behind the blender, rinses the bottle.

“You have a good life here,” Catherine says.

“I have a fine life. Yes.”

“I feel a change coming in my life. I love David, but I’ve been submerged in this love for so long. Too long. Do you know what I mean? I was down looking at the waves and I started saying, ‘He
loves me, he loves me not.’ I do that often. Then I thought, Well, there isn’t any end to the waves, not like there is to a daisy. Or even like there is to my footsteps, if I start counting them to the end of the block. I thought, The waves never, ever come to an end. So then I knew, this is a message for me.”

“Just leave the pots, Catherine. I’ll deal with them later.”

Why doesn’t Stella say, “Sit down, I can manage better by myself”? It’s a thing she has said often to helpers less inept than Catherine. She doesn’t say it because she’s wary of something. Catherine’s state seems so brittle and delicate. Tripping her up could have consequences.

“He loves me, he loves me not,” says Catherine. “That’s the way it goes. It goes forever. That’s what the waves were trying to tell me.”

“Just out of curiosity,” says Stella, “do you believe in horoscopes?”

“You mean have I had mine done? No, not really. I know people who have. I’ve thought about it. I guess I don’t quite believe in it enough to spend the money. I look at those things in the newspapers sometimes.”

“You read the newspapers?”

“I read parts. I get one delivered. I don’t read it all.”

“And you eat meat? You ate pork for dinner.”

Catherine doesn’t seem to mind being interrogated, or even to notice that this is an interrogation.

“Well, I can live on salads, particularly at this time of year. But I do eat meat from time to time. I’m a sort of very lackadaisical vegetarian. It was fantastic, that roast. Did you put garlic on it?”

“Garlic and sage and rosemary.”

“It was delicious.”

“I’m glad.”

Catherine sits down suddenly, and spreads out her long legs in a tomboyish way, letting her dress droop between them. Hercules, who has slept all through dinner on the fourth chair, at the other side of the table, takes a determined leap and lands on what there is of her lap.

Catherine laughs. “Crazy cat.”

“If he bothers you, just bat him off.”

Freed now of the need to watch Catherine, Stella gets busy scraping and stacking the plates, rinsing glasses, cleaning off the table, shaking the cloth, wiping the counters. She feels well satisfied and full of energy. She takes a sip of the mead. Lines of a song are going through her head, and she doesn’t realize until a few words of this song reach the surface that it’s the same one David was singing, earlier in the day. “What’s to come is still unsure!”

Catherine gives a light snore, and jerks her head up. Hercules doesn’t take fright, but tries to settle himself more permanently, getting his claws into her dress.

“Was that me?” says Catherine.

“You need some coffee,” Stella says. “Hang on. You probably shouldn’t go to sleep right now.”

“I’m tired,” says Catherine stubbornly.

“I know. But you shouldn’t go to sleep right now. Hang on, and we’ll get some coffee into you.”

Stella takes a hand towel from the drawer, soaks it in cold water, holds it to Catherine’s face.

“There, now,” says Stella. “You hold it, I’ll start the coffee. We’re not going to have you passing out here, are we? David would carry on about it. He’d say it was my mead or my cooking or my company, or something. Hang on, Catherine.”

David, in the phone booth, begins to dial Dina’s number. Then he remembers that it’s long distance. He must dial the operator. He dials the operator, asks how much the call will cost, empties his pockets of change. He picks out a dollar and thirty-five cents in quarters and dimes, stacks it ready on the shelf. He starts dialling again. His fingers are shaky, his palms sweaty. His legs, gut, and chest are filled with a rising commotion. The first ring of the phone, in Dina’s cramped apartment, sets his innards bubbling. This is craziness. He starts to feed in quarters.

“I will tell you when to deposit your money,” says the operator. “Sir? I will tell you when to deposit it.” His quarters clank down into the change return and he has trouble scooping them out. The
phone rings again, on Dina’s dresser, in the jumble of makeup, panty hose, beads and chains, long feathered earrings, a silly cigarette holder, an assortment of windup toys. He can see them: the green frog, the yellow duck, the brown bear—all the same size. Frogs and bears are equal. Also some space monsters, based on characters in a movie. When set going, these toys will lurch and clatter across Dina’s floor or table, spitting sparks out of their mouths. She likes to set up races, or put a couple of them on a collision course. Then she squeals, and even screams with excitement, as they go their unpredictable ways.

“There doesn’t seem to be any answer, sir.”

“Let it ring a few more times.”

Dina’s bathroom is across the hall. She shares it with another girl. If she is in the bathroom, even in the bathtub, how long will it take her to decide whether to answer it at all? He decides to count ten rings more, starting now.

“Still no answer, sir.”

Ten more.

“Sir, would you like to try again later?”

He hangs up, having thought of something. Immediately, energetically, he dials information.

“For what place, sir?”

“Toronto.”

“Go ahead, sir.”

He asks for the phone number of a Michael Read. No, he does not have a street address. All he has is the name—the name of her last, and perhaps not quite finished with, boyfriend.

“I have no listing for a Michael Read.”

“All right. Try Reade, R-E-A-D-E.”

There is indeed an M. Reade, on Davenport Road. Not a Michael but at least an M. Check back and see, then. Is there an M. Read? Read? Yes. Yes, there is an M. Read, living on Simcoe Street. And another M. Read, R-E-A-D, living on Harbord. Why didn’t she say that sooner?

He picks Harbord on a hunch. That’s not too far from Dina’s apartment. The operator tells him the number. He tries to memorize
it. He has nothing to write with. He feels it’s important not to ask the operator to repeat the number more than once. He should not reveal that he is here in a phone booth without a pen or pencil. It seems to him that the desperate, furtive nature of his quest is apparent, and that at any moment he may be shut off, not permitted to acquire any further information about M. Read or M. Reade, on Harbord or Simcoe or Davenport, or wherever.

Now he must start all over again. The Toronto area code. No, the operator. The memorized number. Quick, before he loses his nerve, or loses the number. If she should answer, what is he going to say? But it isn’t likely that she will answer, even if she is there. M. Read will answer. Then David must ask for Dina. But perhaps not in his own voice. Perhaps not in a man’s voice at all. He used to be able to do different voices on the phone. He could even fool Stella at one time.

Perhaps he could do a woman’s voice, squeaky. Or a child’s voice, a little-sister voice.
Is Dina there?

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“Nothing. Sorry.”

“It’s ringing now. I will let you know when to deposit your money.”

What if M. Read is a woman? Not Michael Read at all. Mary Read. Old-age pensioner. Career girl. What are you phoning me for? Sexual harassment. Back to information, then. Try M. Read on Simcoe. Try M. Reade on Davenport. Keep trying.

“I’m sorry. I can’t seem to get an answer.”

The phone rings again and again in M. Read’s apartment, or house, or room. David leans against the metal shelf, where his change is waiting. A car has parked in the liquor-store lot. The couple in it are watching him. Obviously waiting to use the phone. With any luck, Ron and Mary will drive up next.

Dina lives above an Indian-import shop. Her clothes and hair always have a smell of curry powder, nutmeg, incense, added to what David thinks of as her natural smell, of cigarettes and dope and sex. Her hair is dyed dead black. Her cheeks bear a slash of crude color and her eyelids are sometimes brick red. She tried out
once for a part in a movie some people she knew about were making. She failed to get the part because of some squeamishness about holding a tame rat between her legs. This failure humiliated her.

David sweats now, trying not to catch her out but to catch her any way at all, to hear her harsh young voice, with its involuntary tremor and insistent obscenities. Even if hearing it, at this moment, means that she has betrayed him. Of course she has betrayed him. She betrays him all the time. If only she would answer (he has almost forgotten it’s M. Read who is supposed to answer), he could howl at her, berate her, and if he felt low enough—he
would
feel low enough—he could plead with her. He would welcome the chance. Any chance. At dinner, talking in a lively way to Stella and Catherine, he kept writing the name Dina with his finger on the underside of the wooden table.

People don’t have any patience with this sort of suffering, and why should they? The sufferer must forgo sympathy, give up on dignity, cope with the ravages. And on top of that, people will take time out to tell you that this isn’t real love. These bouts of desire and dependence and worship and perversity, willed but terrible transformations—they aren’t real love.

Stella used to tell him he wasn’t interested in love. “Or sex, even. I don’t think you’re even interested in sex, David. I think all you’re interested in is being a big bad boy.”

Real love—that would be going on living with Stella, or taking on Catherine. A person presumed to know all about Real Love might be Ron, of Ron-and-Mary.

David knows what he’s doing. This is the interesting part of it, he thinks, and has said. He knows that Dina is not really so wild, or so avid, or doomed, as he pretends she is, or as she sometimes pretends she is. In ten years’ time, she won’t be wrecked by her crazy life, she won’t be a glamorous whore. She’ll be a woman tagged by little children in the laundromat. The delicious, old-fashioned word “trollop,” which he uses to describe her, doesn’t apply to her, really—has no more to do with her than “hippie” had to do with Catherine, a person he cannot now bear to think about. He knows that sooner or later, if Dina allows her disguise to crack,
as Catherine did, he will have to move on. He will have to do that anyway—move on.

He knows all this and observes himself, and such knowledge and observation has no effect at all on his quaking gut, zealous sweat glands, fierce prayers.

“Sir? Do you want to keep on trying?”

The nursing home that they visited, earlier in the day, is called the Balm of Gilead Home. It is named after the balm-of-Gilead trees, a kind of poplar, that grow plentifully near the lake. A large stone mansion built by a nineteenth-century millionaire, it is now disfigured by ramps and fire escapes.

Voices summoned Stella, from the clusters of wheelchairs on the front lawn. She called out various names in answer, detoured to press hands and drop kisses. Vibrating here and there like a fat hummingbird.