The Romantic (12 page)

It’s in these letters that I pour out my feelings (
portion
them out is more like it, a minute-by-minute drip): “I woke up feeling carefree and sure. I knew in my heart that nothing could ever come between us again. Then, at breakfast, my father asked, How is Abel doing these days? and I could only tell him how you had been doing, last Sunday, five long days ago, and I realized there is something between us—two-thirds of a continent!!! And the loneliness came rushing back.”

After mailing the first letter I tell him over the phone that it’s on its way. I say,“You don’t have to write back.”

So when a letter arrives two weeks later, I’m almost afraid to open it. The envelope is small and robin’s-egg blue, the single page inside a matching blue and venting an odour of cigarette smoke. Not a letter, after all, but a poem, copied out in calligraphic script. “Romance,” it’s called. By Arthur Rimbaud.

Under this, in his own block-lettered writing, he writes: “You are not alone, so don’t be lonely. You are the lucky star, framed by a small branch. Love Abel.” And a little farther down: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

I cling to the tide, to the “Love Abel” and to the suggestion that I’m
his
lucky star.

One other letter arrives that summer, at the end of August. Again on the blue paper, two sheets this time, and again featuring a poem by Rimbaud, whose writings I am now acquainted with, having found a volume of his collected works in a second-hand bookstore downtown and having therefore learned that, in the first letter, Abel wrote out only part of the poem. Why didn’t he write out the last stanza, which goes on to tell how the boy falls in love with a young girl of “charming little airs”?

“I was getting to the end of the page” is his explanation.

This next poem, called “Eternity,” is short enough that he includes the whole thing.

That’s more like it. More romantic, more obviously having to do with us. Eternity found again, satiny embers. No
hope
here,
no hope out in Vancouver, away from me. The sea fleeing away is our forced parting. Flying off is getting stoned.
Orietur?
I don’t know what that is, I can’t find it in my French-English dictionary.

At the bottom of the page is a pen-and-ink drawing of “A Proliferating Sea Anemone,” which resembles a bunch of worms spilling out of the top of a striped pouch. It’s extremely meticulous, he must have worked on it for hours. But the drawing on the next page, although it couldn’t have taken him more than a few minutes to do, is the one that thrills me. It’s the two of us. There’s my thin face and heavy-lidded eyes, his ringlets and thick eyelashes, and we’re smiling and wearing monks’ robes. We are, as he’s written underneath,“Abelard and Hell-Louise,” an old joke of my father’s. Under this is “The truth shall make you free,” and under that a brown blotch and an arrow pointing away from it to the words: “Beer Spilled by Lenny.”

Beer Spilled by Lenny. As the day progresses, so does my resentment that the drawing should have even been
seen
by the slovenly Lenny. Who could just as easily have been an American draft dodger named Judd or a card sharp named Thumbs, or who knows who else? All the weird people Abel meets on buses and in parks and at a bar called the Parliament, where, even though he’s underage, he gets served draft beer. On the phone, when he tells me about these characters, I try to act entertained despite not understanding why he would prefer them to no one at all, or at least to his school friends, of whom he seems to have a staggering number. From being a loner here in Green
woods he has gone to being Vancouver’s pied piper. Strangers follow him home, they move right in.

For me to say that they sound like bad influences would come across as bourgeois. Still, I hint at it, releasing my disquiet in a parody of concern over his welfare. I can hardly admit to myself, much less to him, that the truth is I’m jealous. He seems abnormally interested in these people, far more so than he is in me. His having friends at all feels like a betrayal.

Sunday night. His turn to phone.

Three days ago I celebrated my eighteenth birthday. Mrs. Carver baked a mocha cake and gave me a pair of surprisingly fashionable patterned knee socks. My father gave me a biography of J. S. Bach and a double-record set of Glenn Gould playing Bach’s partitas. From Abel, though I’d dropped several hints, there was nothing: no letter or telegram, no phone call. This evening I have expectations of a good excuse and an apology.

Ten o’clock arrives. Ten-fifteen. At ten-thirty, worried that something terrible must have happened, I call the operator and am put through.

It’s Mrs. Richter who answers. “Louise!” she shouts. “How
are you?”

“I’m—” I’m unprepared for her good humour.

“Hello?” she shouts.

“Hello. I’m here.”

“How ari? you?”

“Well, I’m waiting for Abel to call. He should have called half an hour ago.”

“He didn’t call?”

“No.”

She makes a guttural noise. “Oh, bad boy, he must have forgot!”

“Forgot?”

“Because, you know, he’s not here. He’s gone out.”

My throat seizes.

“Hello? Louise?”

‘Tes.”

“We have a bad connection!”

I ask if Abel said where he was going.

“Where he was going? No, no. He could be anywhere! Just a minute and I will find out.” Away from the mouthpiece she shouts,“Karl! Karl! Did Abel tell you where he was going?” A pause, then,“Louise, he just
vamoosed!
But I’m sure he’ll be home soon, and he’ll call you.”

He doesn’t. I stay up, waiting. In bed, I cry and endlessly review the possibilities: he was in a car accident; he was murdered by one of his weird friends; his friends got him drunk and he blacked out; he was caught smoking marijuana and has been thrown in jail; he ran into an old girlfriend, who seduced him; he got turned off by my telling him he was the only person on earth I could talk to, the only person I wanted to be with.

Better dead than turned off! No, no, I didn’t mean that. Don’t let him be dead!

Near dawn I sleep for about an hour. As soon as I open my eyes I am hit by a wave of nausea, and I get to my feet and stumble to the bathroom, where I throw up last night’s chicken cacciatore.

“Louise?” my father calls. As I’m coming back down the hall he opens his door. His face startles me, it’s so haggard, not yet hoisted into its cheerful daytime aspect.

“I think I have the flu.”

This throws him into his physician’s persona. He feels my forehead. “You’re not running a fever. Do you have diarrhea, the runs? Stick out your tongue.”

I push past him. “I just need to sleep.”

“I’ll get you a glass of ginger ale.”

“I don’t want one. I’ll be okay. I’m going to stay home today, so could you call my school and leave a note for Mrs. Carver?”

Back in bed I lose consciousness until Mrs. Carver arrives. She brings me a warm red tea that tastes like worms. I spit it back into the cup. “What
is
this?”

“Drink it down,” she whispers. “It’ll settle your …” She rubs her stomach.

“I don’t feel sick any more.”

“It’s also good for …” She makes a sharp shoving-away motion with both hands.

“Banishing my enemies,” I finish.

She gives me a reproachful look that says I should know by now she doesn’t think in terms of enemies or wicked people. If you act badly, it’s because you’ve been goaded by harmful spirits, who themselves are only fulfilling the prophecies of harmful omens. In her school of thought, there is no will, no morality, only atmosphere.

I force down more of the tea. Over the years I have come to welcome her occult interventions as insurance against the faint possibility that she’s actually on to something. She
presses her child-sized, sandpaper-textured palm against my forehead. “I’m not hot,” I tell her. She adjusts her glasses to peer at me, her frazzled eyes arrested for a moment in a look almost penetrating.

“What?” I say.

She pats my leg.

“What?”

She takes the cup and sets it on the bedside table.

When she’s out of the room I sink into dread, convinced she has envisioned some catastrophe in my future. No, no, I’m imagining things. She can’t see into the future! I hear her clattering around in the kitchen. “Mrs. Carver,” I think fondly, and after a few minutes manage to shrivel her down to the sweet, harmless crackpot I’ve lately come to see her as.

Still, I finish the tea.

By now it’s a quarter to eleven, a quarter to eight Vancouver time. If Abel is at home, and not dead or in jail, he likely won’t have left for school yet.

I use the phone in my father’s study. While the operator makes the connection I pray for Abel to answer, but it’s Mr. Richter’s sedate “Hello” that comes over the line. Obviously, no calamity has struck at that end.

“Is Abel there?”—altering my voice in case he isn’t and then he’ll never have to know it was me who called.

“Louise?”

I drop the disguise. ‘Yeah, hi. May I speak to Abel, please?”

“Of course. Yes, of course. Just one moment.”

The dog barks. Mr. Richter calls,“Abel!” and, farther off,
Mrs. Richter sing-songs something I can’t make out. A happy morning in the Richter household. Longing pours through me.

“Playing hooky?” It’s Abel.

“I don’t feel well.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I didn’t sleep last night.”

One of those eternal, excruciating pauses, and then,“I’m sorry I didn’t phone. Mr. Earl, you remember that old black saxophonist I told you about, he was playing at the Bear Pit and I stayed for his set. It was after two by the time I got home.”

“He was playing on a Sunday night?”

“Hey, this is the West Coast.”

“And this is the East Coast.”

Silence.

“Abel, I was really worried. I thought you’d been murdered or something.”

More silence.

“I know it’s crazy.”

“Don’t do this to yourself,” he says quietly.

That does it, that mixture of detachment and pity. Tears start streaming down my face. “Don’t do what?”

“Get yourself down.”

“I don’t get myself down.
You
get me down. You don’t call when you’re supposed to, and that gets me down.”

“I’m sorry. I guess I just … forgot.”

“Forgot!”

“I’m sorry.”

“Everything’s falling apart.”

“No, it isn’t. Don’t say that. Everything’s fine.”

I sigh.

“I’ve got to go. My father’s calling, he’s giving me a ride.”

“Can you phone me when you get home from school?”

No answer.

“Abel!”

“I’ll try.”

“Four o’clock your time. Is that too early?”

“It should be okay.”

“I love you.”

“I know.” Barely audible.

“Do you love me?”

‘Yep.”

“Okay, I’m okay now.”

Throughout the day I master the skill of multiplying by sixty, counting down not the hours, which feel like centuries, but the minutes. Five hundred and ninety. Four hundred and eight-five. I stay in bed and read Rimbaud’s collected poems. ‘Your eye-teeth gleam. Your breast is like a cithara, plucked notes run in your pale arms.” Why didn’t he send me
that
one? Why doesn’t he see me in everything, as I see him?

At suppertime I rouse myself to eat a bowl of beef broth in the kitchen. My father says I still look “a little pale, a little ashen, a little wan.”

“Which?” I burst out. His inability to settle on a single adjective suddenly strikes me as a form of mental illness. “Pale? Ashen? Wan? Washed-out? Colourless?”

He blinks.

“Callow?” I yell.

“I believe you mean sallow,” he says carefully.

“I’m fine,” I mutter.

He fades to nothing. There is only the clock and the phone. When he pours his coffee, I become aware of him again and say, ‘You don’t have to sit with me. I’ll do the dishes.” He escapes gladly. “If the phone rings,” I call after him,“I’ll get it.”

Twenty-five after six.

At a quarter to seven, the dishes done, I sit on the chair under the phone.

Five to seven.

Seven.

Seven-fifteen. Seven-thirty.

I rest my head on the table, in the cradle of my arms. The seconds tick by. They fall, drop by drop, the smithereens of my life. Presently my father strolls in for a second cup of coffee, and I cover my ears with my hands but he speaks anyway.

“Wouldn’t you be better off in bed?”

In bed I am not better off. All I can think about is Abel’s “Yep” when I asked him if he loved me. “Yep.” Like somebody who doesn’t want to talk about it. Or—oh, God—like somebody who is only telling you what you want to hear. But he might have just been confirming the obvious: Yep, of course, goes without saying. In the park he told me he loved me
too
much. Too much for what? For who? Doesn’t he
want
to love me?