Waiting for Time (8 page)
Most of the houses in this neighbourhood are built right at the sidewalk's edge. When people forget to pull their drapes Lav can look into kitchens and living rooms. If I were an artist, she thinks, I would want to paint these people, surround them with colour, with light and shadows. The families eating supper lean towards each other, towards the food which is heavy, earth coloured, unlike anything in supermarkets. Everything, the milk-white arms of women w ashing dishes, blue-faced lovers curled together in front of unseen television sets, the tired young mother who night-after-night spoons food into a baby's pink, smiling mouth, all seem from another century. Even the children, immovable as rocks, slumped on sofas, their eyes never leaving television screens, might be watching a cock-fight in some medieval marketplace.
Each lighted window is a picture, almost nothing changes from night to night, the colour of a shirt, a tablecloth, the arrangement of children watching television. The very monotony lends dignity to the mundane scenes. Lav herself is invisible. Only cats, surveying their street from window ledges, follow her progress with green gold eyes.
On these walks she passes Crotty's store window, reads the mysterious words, watches the clerk. Sometimes the woman is talking to a customer but more often she leans on the counter, a Vermeer, her placid round face cupped in her hands, engrossed in a magazine. Lav has considered going in to find out what the clerk reads with such deep, absorbing interest—and to ask what brewis is.
Far down beyond the store, beyond the houses and streets, Lav can see a scrap of harbour. It gleams steely grey in the cold April light.
“Can you see the harbour?” Mrs. O'Reilly asked when Lav told her that she was living in the Martin house.
Lav told her no, but Alice had insisted, “Surely,” she said, “you can see the harbour from upstairs?”
Every day for a week or more, polite but persistent, she asked the same question—as if some miraculous good fortune came with a view of St. John's harbour. Then, one sunny morning, Lav realized that the bit of deeper blue between Crotty's two chimneys was the harbour.
“I knew very well you'd be able to see the harbour from that house!” Alice O'Reilly said with great satisfaction.
That very evening Lav had dragged Roger Martin's overstuffed chair from his study, pulled it across the hall, up the three steps into the kitchen. Chipping two white-enamelled door frames in the process, she installed the chair in front of the big many-paned window. Now, every night before bed, she spends an hour or so sitting in the chair. Only here does she have any sense of being in a different place—a place distantly akin to the island her mother described.
As she sits watching St. John's harbour fade from grey to black Lav feels very much a visitor, an observer, detached from the real life of the place.
I will do my job and leave, she thinks. It is foolish to imagine otherwise. I will make no real connections, never be invited into the houses I walk past, will not have conversations with people like the woman on the hill or the clerk in Crotty's store. The urge to do so seems unnatural, slightly vulgar, possibly dangerous. She will have to cultivate detachment. Reviewing those pleasant, well-ordered years with Philip, she decides that detachment has served her well.
She pours herself more wine and speculates on what she might do if there is a letter from Philip in the mail on the table behind her—a reply to her casually worded card telling him she has closed the house in Ottawa.
She imagines Philip writing from Australia—a wild, impassioned Philip who will surprise her—he has, after all, proven himself capable of surprising her. Lav amuses herself for some time conjuring up this new Philip. A man who, having cut himself adrift from geography, can now cut himself adrift from history, from order, from habit, from tradition—free himself to follow some new arrangement of urges, impulses more suited to Australian dust and sunshine, to heat and desire.
“Come at once—cannot live without you!” this most unPhiliplike man will write. And what of her? How will this Lavinia, this woman of rusting hair and lengthening snout, respond to his siren song?
It is almost midnight when, having finished the wine, she finally picks up the mail. There is no letter from Philip. There are bills for light and fuel oil, a scrawled message from Roger Martin reminding her to have the furnace checked and cleaned—a remarkable thing to have thought of in Caracas! There is a magazine, a flyer for Papa's Pizza and a brown envelope with “Delivered by hand—To Dr. L. Andrews, From M. Rodway” written across the outside. Inside there are three sheets of paper.
The top sheet is Mark's hand-written note: “I've come across something you might be interested in. Could you meet me at the University—in the Maritime Archives—after work on Monday? Oh yes, the attached telexes came in after you left. Me-ne, Me-ne, Te-kel.”
A coded message from her research assistant—a warning, perhaps.
The second paper, just three lines typed under the DFO heading, reads, “To: Dr. L. Andrews, Department of Fisheries and Oceans Research Station, St. John's, Nfld. From: Dr. Ian Farman, Policy and Program Planning, Science Section, DFO, Ottawa. Puzzled by the implications of your preliminary report. Please reassess material keeping in mind the attached memo from Communications. “
Puzzled indeed. What preliminary report? And, more disconcerting, why has Ian Farman, who must have eaten at her table a dozen times, not added a personal note to his nasty little memo?
The last paper is a copy of another office memo. This one is addressed to Ian Farman and signed by someone named Wayne. Wayne has given himself neither surname or title.
I am not going to like this—I know I am not going to like it, Lav thinks as, gripping the paper under her elbow like a handbag, she makes herself a cup of tea, takes it to the bedroom and, without undressing, crawls into bed where she reads the damned memo.
“Urgently suggest the following rationale be given to Dr. Andrews as a broad basis for her Oceans 2000 advisory report being finalized in St. John's, Newfoundland: The report on Zone PK3 should be regarded as just one model among many being used by government in developing a strategy that will promote science and technology as the driving force for economic activity on Canada's coastal waters. It is the Minister's hope to put in place a policy that will be responsive to the needs of the private sector and consistent with government's strategy to maximize development and exploitation of the resources of our oceans for the benefit of the people of Canada.”
Below the cunningly worded paragraph, separated by three asterisks, its author has added a note, presumably to Ian Farman, “Will be in St. John's next week—think I'll check this Dr. Andrews out. Wayne.”
Lav lies in bed holding the three pieces of paper. She studies the signatures, two of which are machine-printed, rereads each word. Uncertainty settles like a rock in her stomach. She suspects Mark Rodway. What has he done? Why has he dropped off this stuff? Who is Wayne? What does “developing a strategy that will promote science and technology as the driving force” mean? Why urgently suggest? What preliminary report?
She feels disoriented, ill, a tourist picking her way through some foreign maze. It is late, it seems like days since she left the office. She has drunk too much wine, is not thinking clearly. She tosses the papers onto the floor and falls into a fitful sleep.
All night long her ageing salmon swims, first through shifting, weed-filled sludge, then through computer printouts, along watery pathways that rattle with the tap of keyboards smelling of formaldehyde.
She wakes on Saturday feeling only slightly less ill—knowing the night has been fish-haunted, telling herself she should go straight in to the office, track down the mysterious report referred to in the memos. Over coffee she decides to try and forget the memos—after all, nothing can be done until Monday.
She will dedicate the week-end to her physical well-being, do something about appearance, about her face and hair. She consults the phone book, lists dress shops, makes appointments. She finds a fitness centre, has a swim and workout, a massage. She visits three dress shops, a shoe store, then a beauty parlour, gets her hair coloured and styled, has a facial, a manicure. She is cossetted, glossed, coiffed, complimented. At great expense she is pampered. Those who say money cannot buy happiness lie.
On Sunday it is pouring rain and windy. The three pieces of paper are still on the floor near her bed. Lav ignores them. Instead she tries on the dresses, the wool suit, the scarves and shoes, all her purchases of the day before. She admires her newly rinsed auburn hair.
Later she lights the living room fire, settles down with a volume chosen at random from the Martins' shelves. Called
Fallen from the Sky
, the book seems intended for children but is filled with clamourous, unchildlike tales. Stories of how the earth and sky, once one, were torn asunder, how gods and goddesses fell, became vulnerable to pain, to sin, to death.
All through the blustery afternoon she sits by the fire drinking tea, devouring crackers and cheese, reading of Zeus, Apollo and Aphrodite, of how they wreak ungodly vengeance upon one another and upon poor humans. Gods, like humans, seem driven to teach what they cannot learn, succumb repeatedly to the charms of mortals and sometimes suffer endless tortures to help them. Prometheus dares the wrath of Zeus to bring man fire, Pandora opens her cunningly contrived box, Balder the Beautiful dies, he sails out to sea in his fiery ship, “burning like autumn foliage and the earth wept for him and cold and darkness followed.”
Lavinia wept for him.
The sound of her weeping shocks her. She had thought herself content, pleased with her own company, with the fire and the book. But she reads of Balder's death and is attacked by sadness. A shroud of despair, all-embracing impersonal sorrow, drops down upon her and she weeps. Beyond the edge of her weeping there is something else, something closer, more personal. But ice and sleet rattling against the window drowns it out and she huddles on the sofa sobbing for all the poor gods and poor humans who must die, their possessions scattered and their stories forgotten.
When the weeping stops she lies sniffling in misery until dark, until there is not a spark of fire left in the hearth—then she goes to bed.
“After that nothing was ever the same.” People say such things. “That was when it all started,” they say, “From that day on, everything changed,” or “I knew right away.” Conventional, comfortable phrases, phrases that give the illusion of order, of neatness, of one's ability to compartmentalize, to separate event from event, to disentangle.
But life will not be disentangled, has no pattern, and events are connected only in the random way of pebbles tumbling from a narrow-necked bottle—each pebble nudging the other, each one that falls making room for another to fall. For most of us—barring getting hit by a truck or having the earth drop out from under our feet—there is no moment, no hour, no day, when we can say “after that nothing was ever the same.”
Yet that is what Lavinia Andrews will say.
“After that stormy Sunday nothing was ever the same,” she will say “After that night of weeping, events in my life did not wait upon one another, did not politely nudge one another into being. After that everything tumbled helter-skelter—past and present, public and private, reality and imagination melding together.”
That is the way she remembers the days that followed—but of course, days and events must happen in some order, in fixed time—and we must recall them in that order.
On Monday morning Lav wears her new scarf, her woven jacket and the tight slit of skirt she bought on Saturday. She takes great care with her toffee-coloured hair, with makeup that must camouflage all signs of last night's weeping.
Alice O'Reilly, waiting in the lobby, pacing beside the security desk, notices none of this.
“They're moving us! Moving us! Without a word—without as much as a by-your-leave—we're being carted body and bones up to the top floor! And that's not all,” she rushes Lav towards the spiral walkway. “Wayne Drover and his crowd'll be here before week's end. Won't say which day, of course, just, ‘Arriving mid-week from Ottawa!’”
Alice pauses to assess Lav's reaction, apparently not as dramatic as she would wish. “You know who Wayne Drover is?” she asks and, when Lav shakes her head, looks shocked, “Sure I thought everyone in the department knew that one! Wayne Drover's special assistant to Timothy Drew—went to Ottawa with the Minister when he was elected. From here, Wayne is—grew up in the Battery—but sharp as a tack.…”
On the way to the new offices Alice elaborates on Wayne Drover's career, the campaigns he has run for Timothy Drew, on his failed advertising firm, his failed marriage, his ambitions. The man appears to be something of a local celebrity.
The space they have been given is large and airy. Lav points to windows, closets, the corner countertop already holding a kettle and coffee perc—as evidence of their new status, tells Alice she should be pleased.