Crossings (10 page)

Now Paul is telling me about someone else he has demolished. ‘I said, “Is that an ontological or a teleological argument?” You should have seen his face!'

I feel it happening to me. That coldness. ‘What is the ontological proof?' I say softly. It comes over me like a demon, that coldness. I have no pleasure in it. I hate myself afterwards. It happened once in a philosophy seminar. I did it to a nice minister. The professor congratulated the minister on his interesting paper and asked for comments. I started out softly. That's how I know it's going to happen. I drew a few Venn diagrams. The professor said, ‘Yes. Yes. I didn't see it.' And after, the minister says to me, ‘I wouldn't have done that to you.' Robin said, ‘For a nice girl, you have a surprising streak of sheer bitchery.'

Now Paul is trotting out St Thomas and so on, huffing and puffing, completely befuddled. I wait until he is quite done and then I say, ‘I thought it went this way.' And spiel it off neatly, in a precise cold voice.

‘Your trouble, Paul, is you mistake form for essence. You know the labels but you don't know the substance.'

‘But I said
that,
about the attributes.' I just look at him. ‘In effect,' he finishes lamely.

Then he goes into his big unrequited love bit. ‘Kick me, beat me, any touch of your boot is sheer ecstasy.' He suffers beautifully from my cruelty. He is having an affair with Marie on the strength of his passion for me.

We finish the dishes and go back into the dining room to practice my chess game.

‘Shall we play seriously?' says Paul, still smarting.

‘All right.' I lose badly. I listen to Paul explain how, sixteen moves back, I took the pawn, unable to resist the sacrifice, but all along I should have seen that this left me open to attack. In taking the pawn, I had lost the chance to castle. And so on and so forth. ‘I don't sacrifice without a reason,' says Paul.

We play another game. Paul keeps up a running commentary, quoting
Paradise Lost
at me to see if I can follow.

I have moved up my Queen. I am flagrantly careless with her because Paul cares for his so. I know I can shake him with sacrilege.

‘“Whence and what art thou, execrable shape, that dar'st, though grim and terrible, advance thy miscreated front athwart my way?”'

‘I'm waging war,' I say, ‘“by force or guile eternal.”'

‘That doesn't follow,' says Paul, catching me.

“The next verse isn't apt,' I say, lying like a fish. I haven't a clue what the next verse is.

‘True,' says Paul, eyeing me warily.

In the front room, the TV clicks off and Mik lounges toward the kitchen to make some coffee.

Paul says in a low voice, ‘“And what rough Beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.”'

It is horrid. It is too apt. Mik
is
a bit like the monstrous second coming, the rise of the mass man as it inundates the effete super-sensitive aristocrat. Brute, Neanderthal, lowering. I laugh.

Paul smirks at me. To him Mik is nothing more than an interesting specimen. Not real at all, certainly not real enough to be despised. Or loathed. Interesting, as an invertebrate is interesting, especially if it has assumed an upright position.

Mik comes back with his coffee mug and I, ashamed now, look up and smile at him. He nods at me and then leans against the frame of the sliding door.

Paul and I are still in the second game. Mik is behind Paul and Paul, after a few minutes, says, ‘“And at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near.”'

‘Not terribly apt,' I say. I am in a good position by some fluke, but, being there, I can't see what to do with it.

‘The pawn,' says Mik from the doorway.

And I see it. It's lovely. The pawn challenges
en passant
and Paul is screwed either way.

Paul sees it too. ‘Do you
mind
?
' he says over his shoulder. ‘What is the charming expression? Would you please sixty-five?'

This refers to something that has happened earlier, before dinner. Mik and Paul have been talking in low voices, Paul uttering rather high giggles, and when Jocelyn and I carry in the food, Mik has said, ‘Sixty-five.'

‘Sixty-five?' Paul has said.

‘Dummy up,' Mik has said.

Now Mik barks. A hard bark of a laugh. ‘Okay,' he says. ‘I'll “sixty-five.”' He puts it in quotes and I look at him surprised. But Paul is trying to divert me with a knight attack, and I'm too busy to consider this new linguistic evidence. I fall for the diver­sion and I lose, but not without honour.

‘Thanks, Paul,' I say. ‘I guess I'll go to bed.'

‘Let me show you where you went wrong,' says Paul.

‘Oh, do we have to?'

Mik says, casually, ‘Want a game?'

‘If you'd resisted the knight attack,' says Paul, and over his shoulder, ‘Sorry. It's not quite the same as checkers.'

Mik ignores this. To me, he says, ‘You got no end games. You got no openings.' He never called me by my name. He always said ‘you.'

‘Oh,' says Paul elaborately, ‘do you play?'

‘I fool around,' says Mik.

‘By all means,' says Paul. But first he explains my mistake to me. I say I'll make coffee. While I wait for the water to boil, I watch from the kitchen. Paul sets up the board. The white is facing Mik and he reaches for a pawn.

‘Do you mind?' says Paul. ‘Shall we play according to tournament rules?'

‘Sure,' says Mik and takes back his hand.

Paul takes one white pawn and one black and hides them behind his back. Mik doesn't do anything for a moment and I can see Paul thinking he has done it again. Then Mik's finger comes up, slowly, and, just before it taps Paul's right shoulder, I see Paul wince. But it is a gentle tap. Mik gets white anyway.

Paul moves quickly at first. Then I have to make the coffee. By the time I get in with the tray, Paul is staring at the board. ‘You're very good,' he says. He takes the regulation five minutes. ‘Yeeees,' he says at last and moves his bishop. Mik doesn't hesitate. He moves and reaches for the coffee mug.

Paul gets up and gets himself a glass of water. He drinks eight glasses a day, religiously. Later, when I consider him seriously, Aunt Forbes says, ‘Vicky, but I think there's something wrong with his bladder. He goes on the hour every hour.' But Uncle Forbes just says, ‘Oh Christ, Vicky, not another.' It's a lie. I never considered Paul seriously. I just wondered if I should marry him, because of the baby.

The game goes on, very slowly when Paul plays. Mik moves without pausing. Paul starts to say ‘
J'adoube
' when he touches a piece. Holding onto it and checking once more before he releases his hand. Finally, for no reason I can see, he says, ‘I concede.'

He gets another glass of water. ‘I can see where I went wrong,' he says from the kitchen. ‘That first move with the bishop. Yes.' He comes back in. ‘Want another? Best two out of three?'

‘Sure,' says Mik.

They play for hours, and I watch. Paul concedes the second game. Then the third. He has drunk six glasses of water and gone upstairs four times.

‘You play extremely well,' he says to Mik. ‘Where did you learn?'

Mik doesn't answer at first.

Then he looks directly at me. His eyes are very blue. Blue like the sea. I feel a shock in my body. ‘In the Pen,' he says. At me.

Paul laughs from nervousness. ‘I beg your pardon?'

‘In the Pen,' says Mik, still looking at me. ‘From a murderer. A professor. He was in for life.'

Paul says, ‘And what were you doing in the Pen, might I inquire?'

‘I never was no city clerk,' says Mik, still at me. And to Paul, ‘I was doing ten for armed robbery.'

‘How interesting,' Paul says.

But I say, ‘Who did he murder?'

‘His girlfriend.'

I drop my eyes first. Then I laugh. When I look up, Mik is laughing too, silently.

 

I WANT TO PUT this in next, though I know it didn't happen after Mik, but before. That is, I know I wore the dress to Gladys's recital, so I had it before Mik. But it seems to have happened after. And perhaps in some sense it did.

Edna came over one day and said, ‘You've got to get some clothes.'

She was going through a bad patch just then, because of Sam. Until Edna was twenty-one she was a virgin, and dreadfully worried about it. And then, after Sam, he worried about her being a one-shot woman. ‘I can't marry you,' Sam said, ‘until you've got it all out of your system. Look at Vicky.'

Sam had a theory about me. All my troubles stemmed, he said, from my being a one-man woman. Had I experienced life fully before I married Ben, I wouldn't have turned out so flighty. And so, at Sam's urging, Edna trotted equably off to Ottawa where she was to have a summer working at the National Library and screwing as many men as she could muster. In September, she was to come home, It out of her system, and marry Sam.

In September, back she came. The wedding plans were firmly in motion and one night, a week before the ceremony, Sam said, ‘Well, Love, and what did you learn in Ottawa?'

Like a fool she told him.

Sam cancelled the wedding. His final remark was, ‘I'm not going to marry a slut!' And off he went to do his doctorate at Berkeley. His dissertation is on the feminist movement, and I am glad to be able to say he has not yet completed it.

At this point Edna was recovering from a depression, going to a psychiatrist, and working in the university library.

‘I'm going downtown with you,' she said, ‘and I'm going to watch you like a hawk. If I let you do it alone, you'll end up wearing Mother Hubbards.'

Edna's taste in clothes had altered radically when she was in Ottawa. From saddle shoes and short socks she had emerged into patent leather pumps with high spiky heels. From tartan skirts and cardigans, she had plunged into astonishing blouses and short skirts. Rather, her blouses plunged into her.

‘Just look at what you've got on!' she said.

It was a two-piece turquoise print, size eighteen and a half. The jacket had a little peplum. Jocelyn had given it to me for Christmas.

‘What's the use of losing all the weight if you go around like
that
!
' Edna said.

We caught the bus like two schoolgirls and went to the Hudson's Bay. I moved gingerly toward the half-size rack and took down a brown two-piece print, with a peplum jacket and little rhinestone buckles on false pockets. ‘I can take off the buckles,' I said. ‘I can take off the pockets for that matter.'

Edna looked at the tag. ‘Eighteen and a half,' she said with grim satisfaction. ‘It's good I'm into my aggressive stage.' She made me go into the dressing room. ‘You just wait,' she said. ‘I'll bring you everything.'

She brought a blue suit first. With a blue and white polka dot blouse. Size ten.

‘I can't get into that,' I said.

‘I'm starting you off easy. First we satisfy the prig, then we satisfy the beast.'

I put it on and a slender girl looked back at me from the mirrors. An elegant slender girl with long brown hair and no make-up. Large eyes. A girl in a blue suit. I turned and she turned. I smiled at her and she smiled back at me.

‘Yes, that's all right,' said Edna appearing with a brown and white thin cotton.

‘No. I think I'll take this one,' I said.

‘Of course you'll take it,' said Edna. ‘I knew you would. It's so damned prissy. Now get this on.'

‘I can't. Look at the back. It isn't there.'

‘So?'

I took them both, signing the cheque for forty-six sixty-five in fear and trembling.

‘Now shoes,' said Edna.

‘Oh I've got to have tea first. No, I've got to. I'm sweating like mad. I can't do anything else until I have some tea.'

But after the tea I bought high-heeled sandals, beige, with clear plastic inserts between the straps. Sixteen ninety-five. ‘Plastic,' I said. ‘My god, I've gone utterly vulgar.'

‘Nothing that costs that much can be vulgar,' said Edna.

‘I can't wear them in front of Grace,' I said.

I look back and I remember, in all those nine years of my marriage, exactly what I bought and how much I paid for it. The black winter coat, forty-eight dollars; the two yards of tweed for the jumper, two dollars and ninety-eight cents; the red perforated shoes with crepe soles, nine ninety-eight. Yes. I'd had to ask Ben for the money. I was broke and I had to have shoes to go to the scholarship committee. I had to ask him for ten dollars. He paid my room and board but not my clothes or books or fees. That was agreed. I hated asking him. I bought the most sensible shoes I could find. I figured they'd last me through my last year. They did, and I hated them.

The Mexican blouse and skirt: forty-eight pesos. The wicker handbag: forty. The navy blue suit when I started teaching: forty-eight dollars; the paisley dress: eighteen ninety-five in Bellingham. The black pumps: three dollars and ninety-five cents.