A Beauty (5 page)

The whole time Doris danced with Henrik, Aggie leaned against the wall, watching. After a while she recalled what he’d said about Elena Huhtala at the last church social. If she told the girls they’d laugh and laugh. But she wasn’t going to tell them.
“A face to launch ships,” he’d said. And him a thousand miles from any ocean.

Ten minutes out of Trevna the children fell asleep on the wagon floor, and before long Maria’s head was nodding. Henrik half-dozed, too, until Bess and Basket picked up their pace, knowing they were nearing home, and then he sat up, blinking, in time to see the black shapes of the Huhtala farm pass by, the swing barely visible, hanging lifeless. No sign of the Lincoln roadster. He figured she’d sent the fellow packing and was sleeping as they passed, safe in her bed. But perhaps no longer a virgin.

They creaked and clopped along. The night was beautiful with stars and cool air and grassy smells. No one whistled. A breeze rippled over them and behind them the swing moved. He was sure it moved. The ropes groaned against the wood. Ahead, the road shimmered in the weak starlight. The fields Henrik owned went on and on until they melted into the darkness. He groped under Maria’s dress for her knee, for the feel of naked flesh in his hand. When he found it, however, some reproof from the vast yielding softness of her inner thigh travelled through his fingers, and he was shocked by a gust of remorse, and worse than remorse, dread.

Aggie Lindquist dreamed the writer woman came to supper at their house, Agatha What’s-her-name. She looked like a writer, with glasses worn low on her nose, and she sat down opposite Aggie at the table, but right away Aggie thought there was something
funny about her. She couldn’t settle properly on her chair; she kept on slipping and sliding to one side or the other. Aggie didn’t like to draw attention to it by asking what was wrong, so she stood up and peered over the table, and then she saw what it was. The woman was a mermaid. Her whole bottom half was a fish’s tail and couldn’t stop squirming.

M
erv Badger, proprietor of the Addison Hotel of Addison, Saskatchewan, was petting the cat. Under the terms of his marriage contract (some thirty years old this summer), he was allowed to pet the cat, but the contract was unwritten, unspoken, and changed more often than the weather – way more often than the recent weather, which had been nothing but hot and dry. Merv cringed when Pansy entered the bedroom, in case it was a stupid thing to be doing this late in the evening before bed, sitting in his underwear indulging an animal that responded to him with indifference unless he was actively giving it pleasure. The cat took the moment of Pansy’s arrival to begin purring like a lawn mower, sending vibrations down Merv’s knees all the way to his bony bare feet. Involuntarily, he shivered and his toes splayed against the floor boards. Pansy ignored him and the cat. She sat down on her side of the bed, facing him as if facing the wall, and unbuttoned her blouse.

Pansy Badger was built to be a laundress; she’d said that to Merv the first time he’d watched her undress. It was her idea of a joke, but it was true. Her ribs were what you noticed. “You could
use me for a scrub board,” she said. Her tiny breasts the size of walnuts. She tossed her blouse to the rocking chair beside Merv and raised her arms to let down her hair. She’d cut it the year before, but every night she raised her arms the same, right after throwing her blouse on the chair. Merv glanced up through his eyelashes to her armpits.

She stretched her back. “
Christ
, I’m tired,” she said.

“
You’re
tired,” he said.

“Oh, you,” she said and yawned big enough to swallow him and the cat.

He’d never told her the sight of her underarms, with their own version of her fine, straight hair, aroused him. He could feel the old worm stir, although they rarely had sex anymore, it was too much work.

Pansy rummaged under her pillow for her nightgown. “This place’ll be the death of me,” she said.

“We should’ve bought fire insurance.”

“Jesus Christ, Merv.”

“I know.”

“Why bring it up? Why go on about it? It’s too late now. We couldn’t pay the first month’s premium.”

They’d bought the hotel for the proverbial song during Prohibition and for a few years after repeal they’d managed to think they’d made a solid investment. When the Depression hit, they’d had to lay off the young girl and the old man they’d employed to do the work. Merv and Pansy were in their fifties by then and firm in their opinion that management was more their style than labour.

Pansy pulled her worn old nightie over her head and poked her arms into it.

“I think you’re thinner,” Merv said. He could still see quite a
bit of her through the greyed fabric with its once-perky sprigs of some unknown flower.

“Thinner than what? You?
Christ
. That would be something.”

They had both lost weight as the years went on. Neither of them liked to cook and when it came to meals, as in many other instances, they’d fallen into the habit of waiting one another out. Neither ever wanted to be the first to make a move. They ingested their fair share of baloney, trimming off the green when it got rather old.

Pansy shimmied out of her skirt under the nightie’s tent. She fumbled at her waist to unpin her underpants, and half-stood. The elastic was so shot they slid to her ankles and landed at her feet, licking at her feet in a pale puddle Merv knew would be warm. Then she had the pin in her mouth, open, between her teeth. Silver colour, one end hooded, the other straight and sharp. Merv held his breath until she reached down and refastened the thing in the pants to be there ready the next morning.

“I wonder what Old Jock and Old Caldwell had for supper,” he said. It was a game she liked as it gave fair scope for sarcasm. The cat rolled in his lap and bared its belly, then grabbed at his hand with its claws-out paws when he stroked it. Scared of what it wanted. Could only take it for a minute, and then rolled back again to feel his hand from the fine bones of its head down its bumpy length and along its tail. Liked its tail pulled. Wouldn’t we all? Merv thought, lazily.

“Steak and onions,” Pansy said. “Ham and scalloped potatoes. Pork chops and – some goddamn
entrée
. Seeing they can afford to eat out.” Jock and Caldwell were the two old bachelors who made their home at the hotel. The skirt and the underpants joined the blouse on the rocker, and she fell back on top of the bed.

“Jesus. This room is stifling,” she said. It was his fault, like everything else, and she meant to bring to his mind all the other
rooms she might have found herself in, and didn’t and couldn’t, because of him. “And that cat is making the most annoying sound.”

“Ah yes,” he said. “The sound of contentment.”

He could still make her laugh. She always acted surprised, as if he’d just developed a sense of humour as a gift for her. And when she laughed she looked right into his eyes. He made her laugh as often as he could. It took the two of them right out of time, right away from that place. It was like being immortal, for a second, or at least not the owners of the Addison Hotel.

He got up and let the cat out. Pansy refused to sleep with it in the room; she’d refused even to give it a name. He lowered the lamp wick and the room went dark. He crawled onto the bed. The two of them lay flat on their backs on top of the sheets, gazing at the shadowed ceiling, waiting for oblivion.

One thing Merv didn’t like about getting older was the worrying. He didn’t recall worrying so much when he was young, and about things that hadn’t happened and were unlikely at that. Some nights it was tough to get the picture of her swallowing that pin out of his mind.

Bill said it would be hard to get a room if they left it too late. Elena said she’d never been inside a hotel.

“These small-town hotels are mostly excuses for beer parlours,” he said.

“I’ve never been in one of them, either,” she said.

“You couldn’t. No women allowed. You don’t get out much, do you, kid?” She was still snuggled up to him, and he rubbed her arm to show her he felt warm towards her.

They pulled into Addison, one of the villages every seven
miles or so along the rail line – seven miles reputedly being the distance a crew could lay track before needing a bed for the night, back when they were building the railroad. “This look like anywhere?” Bill asked, pulling up in front of the one hotel.

“It sure does,” she said.

He went ahead to make the arrangements, in other words to wake the owners up, since every window in the false-fronted box was dark and the whole of Main Street, which was almost the whole of Addison, was deserted.

If there was one thing that could remind Merv and Pansy who they were and where they were, if not why, it was a rap on the front door after they’d locked up for the night. Neither of them moved except to stop breathing. A little while passed and whoever it was knocked again, louder this time. Pansy groaned.

“I’m not going,” Merv said.

“Well I’m not,” Pansy said.

Down the hall, in the minuscule rooms they rented by the year, Old Jock Macklin and Old Caldwell Kurtz pulled their pillows over their heads. They knew the owners, if the poor sod outside didn’t.

Elena waited in the roadster with the top down and the night around her. Bill looked up at the stars while he waited for someone to come and answer the door.

“Ever think about those things?” she called to him.

“All the time,” he said. About a billion of them had pricked through by now, clustering in constellations he felt he should be able to name. He knocked on the door again, and turned back to
see her sitting in the open convertible, her face moonlight-pale. He lit a cigarette and took a long drag that was like drinking her in. The night was still warm but with that rim of coolness where it met his skin. He backed away from the door and looked up at the hotel and saw a man’s narrow face disappear from the middle window on the second floor and the curtain drop. He heard someone on the stairs – the walls were thin enough to allow that, he noted – and got his semi-apologetic smile ready.

The room wasn’t as clean as it might have been, but it didn’t matter so much because the globe on the one lamp was so smoky it hardly let out light. The water in the two pitchers on the dresser had sat there for several days, the drinking water covered with a cloth that said “Addison Hotel” in some kind of nubby pink cross-stitch, or actually “Addis Hote”; the last letters had been picked out or fallen off. The wash water had drowned an unfortunate pair of houseflies who floated on it, belly up, each of them with his brittle black legs tangled in his last struggle against his fate. The commode down the hall had been fully appreciated by Old Jock and Old Caldwell.

Bill passed her his flask after he’d taken a swig, but she wouldn’t have any. Just as well, he thought, gauging how much was left by the heft. He’d drunk quite a bit of it before going into the dance hall, as he usually did.

In those days a double bed was smaller than it is now, and this one swayed to the middle, so when they were both in it, they were almost necessarily touching. He slid his arms around her and nuzzled and kissed the back of her neck. She hadn’t taken her dress off, had only slipped out of her shoes, and his lips nudged at her collar and bumped along the curved vertebrae and vibrated over the fine hairs there. He moaned. It was a quiet, involuntary, yet satisfying
moan. It had welled all the way up from his groin. He thought it reached out to her, the articulation of his desire. She didn’t respond. He moaned again, more communicatively this time.