“What kids?”
“A brother and sister in apartment three. Good kids, just nowhere to play.” He indicates the staircase.
“Go ahead,” I say.
I don’t want him looking at my rear end. When he starts climbing, I try not to look at his: the womanly girth of his hips. The stairs are the original hardwood, pale and worn to a velvety texture, sagging in the middle, a first indication, in this house, of its ghosts. I ask how many tenants there are.
“Ten. Six apartments. One on the first floor, mine. Three on the second, two on the third. Yours is on the second at the back.”
“Mine?”
“The apartment that uh, that, uh—”
“That’s for rent,” I finish.
He can’t get the key to turn. “Come on,” he mutters.
Once we’re in, he loosens up, flicking on the overhead light. “Eight-foot ceilings. All the original mouldings. New linoleum.” He turns in a circle. ‘You get a cross breeze with the two windows.”
Maybe so, but it must be a hundred degrees in here. And the linoleum has a fake-brick pattern, and there’s just this one tiny room, apparently, since everything is in view: a single bed, a kitchen alcove, a brown-corduroy chesterfield, a card table and four chairs.
“Is there a bathroom?” I ask.
“Bathroom!” He strides over to what I took for a closet door and throws it open. “Toilet. Sink. Bathtub. Shower.”
“A plumbing extravaganza.”
He slides me a combative smile. “I believe I told you it was snug.”
“Snug. That’s not the word that leaps to
my
mind.”
“I see.” Nodding at his shoes.
“So—” I move toward the door. “Now I suppose we go down to your place and you show me your etchings.”
I say this out of impatience for whatever experience I’m meant to have this evening, but also because I’m discovering that when I hurt him, and then pity him, he becomes almost attractive.
The muscle twitches in his cheek.
‘You can offer me something to drink,” I say.
As soon as he opens the door to his apartment, I feel the humidity.
“Oh,” I say. “It’s big.”
It’s lovely. Who would have thought? Floor-to-ceiling wooden bookshelves, a worn Oriental carpet, antique furniture, not refinished (I notice stain marks on the coffee table, battered chair legs) but tasteful. When he turns on a lamp I see his desk and, next to it, an upright piano. ‘You have a piano,” I say, and feel a sudden, breathless grief. I could be standing in the Richters’ living room in Greenwoods.
“I don’t play,” he says. “Do you?”
I look at him. His laughable hair. I detect the throb underfoot from the laundromat machines. “No. I had a boyfriend who played. Really well.” I drop into a maroon armchair. “It’s like a steam bath in here.”
He hurries across the room and raises the
Venetian
blinds. A fan is revealed. He switches it on.
‘Your books must be ruined,” I say.
“I’m not a collector. I buy books for what’s in them. I only hold on to these because I have the shelves.”
He goes into the kitchen. From the chair I glimpse a clean white tile floor and blue cupboards. He moves around quietly. When he emerges it’s with a tumbler of ice water in one hand and two wine glasses and a corkscrew in the other. The bottle is under his arm.
I press the tumbler to my cheek, my forehead. He sits across from me on the divan and starts uncorking the wine.
“I’ll touch it in a second,” I say as he fills our glasses.
He looks up quickly.
“The divan. You’re always telling me I should touch it. So here I am. Ready to touch.”
He purses his lips, unsure of how to take this, and yet
game, and why wouldn’t he be? I’m where he’s been trying to get me for two months. I’m frail and fainting, alluding to seduction. Seeing his confidence rise, however, my interest drops, and so I inspect him for something to be … not aroused by, that’s out of the question, something to be moved by.
His eyes, I decide, the intelligence and suffering not entirely extinguished by all that craftiness. I need more, though. I survey the apartment. The desk is a rolltop. Nothing on it except for a leather-bound binder stuffed with papers.
I set down the tumbler and pick up my wine. “To poetry,” I say.
He pauses a moment before raising his glass.
“Will you read me something?” I ask. “Of yours?”
He takes a drink. “No.” Quietly. “I don’t think I will.”
I get up and sit next to him.
Our thighs touch. On the back of my knees I can feel the softness of the leather. “It’s like skin.” I run my hand over
His face is empty.
I reach across his chest and turn off the lamp.
He trembles. Or it’s the vibration from the washing machines. I kiss him. His breath smells faintly of mushrooms, a relief from the overpowering briskness of the cologne. I shut my eyes. His lips are as soft as the divan. His desperation, though I sense it twisting inside him, stays contained. He puts down his glass and brings his arm around my shoulders. I let myself sink back. I sink into the kiss but not so deeply that I forget it’s Don Shaw’s mouth, it’s Don Shaw’s fingers unbuttoning my blouse.
We make love there on the divan. As if I were a sleeping child he kisses my forehead, my throat. Lingering, gentle kisses meant to relax me. But they’re not working. I shift my inner gaze to his, and that’s better. The trick is to imagine what
he
feels, to see it all from his point of view. I am only a girl, too young and pretty to be here. I am a gift. Nobody would believe it.
He comes in a sudden, single spasm. I open my eyes to his grimacing face. Almost frightened, I roll out from under him, onto the floor. He collapses. I get up and grab my clothes. My stomach is slick with his sweat. I step in front of the fan but before I’m dry I start dressing.
“What’s your hurry?” he gasps.
“I’d better go. My dad will start worrying.”
“Why don’t you phone him?”
I button up my skirt. “Where’s my purse?”
He sits up and switches on the lamp. “Hey,” he says.
I glance over … at a chubby, middle-aged man with oily, beige hair sticking out in horns.
“Stay,” he says. “Just for a few more minutes. You haven’t even drunk your wine.”
“I can’t. I’m sorry.”
He reaches for his shirt. “I’ll walk you to the bus stop.”
“No!” I spin around.
He goes still.
“I’ll be okay.” I spot my purse beside the maroon chair and I rush over and pick it up. I feel as though a crime has been committed, some harmless prank, lighting matches, and now the house is on fire.
“Well.” He nods at the floor.
I can’t afford to start pitying him again. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say.
He doesn’t look up. “I take it you won’t be renting the apartment.”
“No.”
More nodding.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say again.
I want to convince him. Not to offer false hope but because it irks me to think that he has already resigned himself to something I wasn’t certain of until this moment.
Before settling down to hard drinking, Abel turns the deadbolt. If you keep knocking, and he’s still conscious, he may slide out one of his ready-made notes. Either
CALL YOU LATER
(How? His phone has been disconnected), or
THANKS, JUST LEAVE IT
(whatever you’re shouting you’ve brought: the bag of groceries, the milk that will go sour in his overheated hallway) or
STILL ALIVE
! (the exclamation mark for
your
sake, to applaud a circumstance he himself finds merely interesting). It used to be he would occasionally talk to you through the door, but after all the vomiting and damage to his throat his voice is too soft, and, anyway, all he ever said was along the lines of call you later, or just leave it. That he was still alive, you gathered.
He didn’t write the notes himself. He had Joyce, a waitress from his piano-bar days, do it. Three lots of fifty each. During the Depression, Joyce won a national penmanship contest, and when you pick the note up off the floor and there’s her lovely flowing script and the faint pencil line she drew to keep the words straight, you feel that at least you’ve been dismissed with some ceremony, as if by a butler. He keeps each lot in a different pocket of his army greatcoat, but he gets them mixed up anyway, he gives you the
THANKS, JUST LEAVE IT
note when you’ve arrived empty handed. Sometimes the
STILL ALIVE!
note is already waiting for you. I tell
him he can’t make such a sweeping claim, that he should at least write in the time:
STILL ALIVE! AT
4:30 or 6:00 or whenever. And so he tries. He finds the pen. With a wobbling hand he adds the numbers, and you stand there wondering, is that a nine or a seven, a three or an eight?
If he isn’t drinking hard—and he can go for two days restricting himself to what he calls therapeutic hits—the door is usually ajar. People walk right in. Old friends from the piano bar. Cindy, the beautiful manicurist from across the hall, taking a break between clients. Archie, the superintendent, beer in hand. There being nowhere to sit, Archie leans against the refrigerator and tells jokes in a grim, rapid-fire manner. Abel, lounging on the bed, nods as if to jazz. Cindy laughs, but at things in general, to promote optimism. Upon entering the apartment she announces herself cheerfully with,“I’ve had it up to here,” or,“Don’t even ask,” referring, supposedly, to her failing business. Her smile veers on the hysterical, which is why I think her high spirits are for show, for his sake.
I come by every day now, on my way to work and then, if I can, on my way home. His parents come after supper, making the hour-and-a-half trip from Waterloo where Mr. Richter, now in semi-retirement, teaches chemistry. Even
they
don’t always get in. At least three mornings a week I arrive to find a bag of groceries and Tupperware containers of cooked food still out in the hall. Mrs. Richter brings flowers from her garden—daisies, black-eyed Susans, tea roses—bundling the stems in a wet rag and, over that, plastic wrap. Once, the rag was torn from the orange-and-red skirt she had on the first time I saw her.
I know he wants me there in the mornings, but it’s always a relief when I’m not shut out by the deadbolt. The second relief is the sound of his raspy breathing. I go to the bed. He sleeps on his back, the book he was reading before he dropped off—
Blake’s Complete Poems
or Yeats’s
Selected Poetry—
often still opened on his chest. I think,“One day I might be looking at a corpse.” I try to imagine it, but the rush of dread this produces seems too familiar to be anything other than the outskirts of a feeling there’s no preparing myself for.
I put away any groceries. If his mother brought flowers, I throw out the old bouquet and arrange the new one in his only drinking glass. The cats cry at my feet, I don’t know why, their bowls are full, they recoil when I try to pat them. He goes on sleeping. It isn’t until I throw back the covers that he opens his eyes. “Louise,” he says as if we’ve been parted for years. I help him to his feet. He tells me what he was dreaming about: another planet, its mauve atmosphere and plates of light, a glass airplane hangar filled with swallowtail butterflies the size of zeppelins. He often dreams we’re making love. So do I. In my dreams we are children again. In his, our bodies are surreal. I have three breasts or I’m covered in nipples. He has hands like tree branches, infinitely fingered, he has a penis that extends out of telescopic sleeves.
“Far out,” I say.
“It was,” he says, ignoring the sarcasm. “It was beautiful.”
While he sways and trembles, I open the cigar box. Usually there’s a cigarette inside, already rolled. I light it and insert it between his lips, wincing along with him at his first inhalation, which he admits scalds his throat. He looks to make sure the ashtray is nearby; he wouldn’t want to spill
ashes on his clean carpet. His mother has told me (in a tone of hopefulness, taking it as a positive sign) that his blackouts never last more than a few hours. So it must be during the intervals that he puts himself and the apartment back together. Still, I glance around for damage—splinters of glass, whisky splashed on the wall. I scan his face and arms for bruises. One morning, catching me at this, he says,“I drink in the bathtub.”
“You have a
bath?”
“I don’t run the water.”
I light his cigarette.
“I know when I’m going to black out,” he says.
“How?”
“I hear wailing.”
“Like somebody crying?”
“Like a siren. Far off.”
“A blackout siren,” I say.
He smiles as if this were a staggering witticism. “Louise,” he says.
“I’ve got to get going,” I say, irritated. “I’m late.”
His candour terrifies me. Only a couple of weeks ago, he would never have raised the subject of his drinking, not to me. I’ve been lecturing him all year to face the truth and fight back, but this seems to be facing the truth only for the sake of proving that there’s nothing alarming about it, nothing you can’t casually dismiss.
One morning I open the door to find him scrubbing the carpet. The sleeves of his pyjama top are rolled up, and for the first time in months I see the shocking thinness of his forearms.
“What happened?” I say. The water in the bucket is pink. “Oh, God, did you hemorrhage?”
He continues scrubbing with both hands, one to steady the other. He’s using a nail brush. “Just a bit of blood.”
“I’ll drive you to the hospital.”
“I’m all right. I took my blood pressure.”
“Abel, please. For my sake.”
“I’m okay. I feel fine now.”
“Well, then let me finish this.”
“It just needs rinsing.” He goes to the bed and sits.
I empty and refill the bucket, then find a dishcloth. “Wait!” I say when I hear him fumbling for a cigarette. I hurry over to light it.
‘You’re so fierce,” he says. ‘You’re like a mongoose.”
He means this as a compliment. I go back to the bucket and kneel down and start dabbing at the stain. “Doesn’t it hurt?” I say.
“What?”
“Everything. Vomiting.”