Crossings (14 page)

‘But didn't you ever see a doctor?'

‘No, I was too afraid of doctors.'

In Mexico, we get a letter saying, ‘I've always wanted to travel. You are living my dream. I am a gypsy at heart, just like you, Ben. If only I could see all those wonderful places. Vicky describes them so well.'

Out of revenge, sheer revenge, I send her a cheque for the plane fare.

We get it back by return mail. Oh she couldn't. Oh dear. Oh saints alive. Who would make lunch for Edwin? Oh my goodness, it's so kind, but she always babysits for Vera on Tuesdays, oh my goodness, she was so surprised, but if anything ever happened to Edwin while she was away, they're both getting on you know. I write a letter, pointing out the sheer absurdity of each and every one of her arguments, and accuse her of cowardice. Ben persuades me not to send it.

He grew up believing his mother to be dying of cancer of the bone, and himself to be the cause of it.

‘She didn't know.' Ben turns on me his saintly smile. ‘She never meant to worry me.'

‘She meant to worry you.' But I don't think I say it.

I could even explain her, I suppose. ‘With Vera,' she says, ‘when my water broke, I was so ashamed. I kept trying to clean it up and more kept coming, all over the floor. I didn't want Edwin to see. I thought I'd dirtied myself.' She tells me she took quinine for all her children, but it never worked.

Ben told me that once, when he was about eight, he'd almost fallen into an old abandoned well. He was playing in an empty lot and suddenly, beneath his feet, the ground opened up, and he fell, grabbing the edge at the last minute. ‘All I could think of was, If she ever found out! She'd have died of a heart attack.'

I would have run home and reenacted the whole thing for my mother's benefit. I did this so often that when I came in one day, from a fall with the horse, blood from head to toe, she said, exasperated, ‘Oh Vicky, what have you done now?'

‘I kept everything from her,' Ben says. ‘She worries so.'

 

I DON'T remember how I got him to leave that night. I think I persuaded him that we needed ‘time to think things out.' I think I said we needed breathing space. I could feel him suffering at me. Pain stood out on his forehead like sweat. Part of me swayed toward him. This was Ben, it was Ben! And I wished a dark empty hole would open into the universe, and he would fall into it, missing the sides, unable to stop, down, down, into oblivion, where I could never feel him hurting anymore.

‘But what will
you
do?' he said.

‘I'll be okay.'

‘But what if you get an asthma attack?'

‘I can give myself a needle,' I say.

‘But you get air in,' he says.

That's true. I just realized. That story about the sores on my hip? That was my doing. Dr Soronski came on the scene two years after the divorce. The sores were my doing. I did get air in the needle. Ben never got air in the needle. So all that is just another lie. All that imputation of bad needlemanship. Just another lie. It was my fault.

And he left, in the thin gleam of February gold, driving away into the fog, the cheque in his pocket, the fourteen shirts in a suitcase.

I had a shower and douched. I said to myself, Well, I've done
that
anyway, as if douching made it less culpable, gave Ben an even chance somehow. And maybe, too, I was giving me a chance. I felt a bit like Mik must have, sitting in his body cast on the bench in the Saskatoon airport with the $8,000 in the suitcase: Well, it seemed a good idea at the time.

I got out to the lab on the dot of eight-thirty. I was never late. I must have hitch-hiked. Ben had taken the car. All day, my head floating above my body, I titrated.

I worked in a tar-paper shack with a girl called Marcie. It was one of those temporary structures built after the war. I was out last Wednesday. It's still there. This was the job I'd had through university: Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, Christmas and Easter holidays, summers. My first boss is now Sister Mary Joseph. I went through her conversion with her, a long agony of love, me playing devil's advocate. I was just her general dog's body at first, but when Sister Mary Joseph left to enter the silent order, I found myself with five assistants. Marcie had been one of them. When Ben and I left for Mexico and freedom, Marcie became the boss. Now I was her assistant. Dr Mercereau, who dropped in once a day to check the results, said, ‘You prove my point, Mrs Ferris. It is all a great waste of time to give technicians a university degree. You fill their heads with theories and then forbid them to exceed instructions. Now, you, you are intelligent and know nothing about chemistry. I can trust you never to innovate.' I was dependable, I was never late, I never exceeded instructions. I measured and weighed and calculated, and argued God with Marcie.

It was somewhere about noon. I was titrating, sitting on a stool in front of the window. This was Sister Mary Joseph's idea: to put the apparatus in front of the window; once in a while, she said, we should look up from the meniscus to the sky. I may be wrong—it may be too good to be true—but it seems that that day Marcie was having a struggle with her virginity. She was a good Catholic, Marcie, from a huge family of good Catholics, and it was a serious matter.

Through the window, beyond the titrating apparatus, I could see the soft slanting parallel lines of the rain, making congruent angles with the evergreens. Beyond were the experimental gardens, lush and misty with spring. Gently burgeoning. We wore white laboratory coats and made coffee on a Bunsen burner. It was warm and safe in the hut, and the rain made a reassuring thrumming on the roof. Down at the end of the lab, the retort flasks bubbled merrily. We were safe, enclosed, there was order in the world.

The hut next door was the men's lav, and behind that was a little room where the hapless English teaching assistants met students and worked up notes for their freshman lectures. From the window I saw Robin going in the back door.

At lunchtime, he called for me. And we walked in the rain, talking about his paper for philosophy. He wanted to read mine, the one I'd done at Christmas. ‘What did you get, Vicky?'

‘I hate people asking that,' I said. ‘Marks mean nothing. I refuse to discuss marks.'

Grace and I went through years of this, each of us cracking down top grades in our respective faculties, and each of us not only refusing to discuss the grades, but refusing to look at them when they were posted in the halls. It was a point of honour not to look. We despised the ‘Whajaget' types. The only mark we ever discussed was the foul French mark we got in our first year. It was acceptable to discuss failure. Besides, we knew it wasn't womanly to be bright.

Robin said, ‘But Dr Gowan advised me to read it. Your paper.'

I felt a clutch of panic. I was sure Robin was brighter, more incisive than Dr Gowan; he would see through it right away.

‘And if the mark means so little, why can't you tell me what it was? Making a mystery only gives it importance.'

‘All right. I got 136.' We were graded out of 150.

‘Was that the highest?' said Robin.

‘I have no idea.'

‘Oh I expect it was.' And he went into one of his dances, skipping into the long wet grass and picking early crocuses, putting them behind his ear. I stood, old and fat, awkward, watching him, laughing. He was like a faun, clumsy from birth still. I felt centuries older.

We talked about Wittgenstein. I said Russell was all wrong, of course, and Robin said ‘Really?' in a way that made me feel an absolute fool.

I thought that was all there was to it. We'd done our necessary twenty minutes, that was that. It was gentlemen's rules; he'd said.

But Robin, as he left me at the lab door, said, ‘Shall I come over tonight?'

I was surprised. ‘Oh you don't have to,' I said.

‘I'd like to,' Robin said and my guts lurched madly. I was in love.

But that night, in my arms, he said, with a painful precision, ‘I don't want you, I just want.'

We were all so honest. It was the great virtue.

He was a poor lover. Thin. Bony. Young. For the first time in my life, I had no orgasms. Not that he noticed. I felt so old and fat and helpless and I adored him so. If I saw him in that large baggy dirty forest green sweater, loping across the mall, my body would go thwunk! as if I'd walked into a cattle fence. My body recognized him before my mind did. It became an issue in the philosophy seminar.

‘Can one feel pain before one knows the word “pain”?'

I said yes and Robin said no. He was in a strange mood and asked me in a snarky way if I could cite an example. I went into a long rambling anecdote about how I'd gone to the dentist that week, how he'd said he could tell by my eyes I was in pain, something about the pupils contracting, but how I hadn't been in pain at all. It came out all wrong. Robin said, in his most English voice, that while we all admired Mrs Ferris's courage in the dentist chair, he couldn't quite see the relevance of the tale, however cleverly told, and he himself was the first to bow to Mrs Ferris's dramatic ability which could make a ballade of a bicuspid; nevertheless …

And when the minister had given his paper, I demolished it.

Robin said, ‘For a nice girl, you have a real streak of bitchiness.'

I told no one about Robin although one day Jocelyn came over and found him in the basement suite. She was in third year then, living at Acadia Camp. Years later, she said, ‘I just didn't believe it, I guess. He was
so pimply,
Vicky.'

But someone else guessed, a boy called Rod Slitvitz. His real name was Morris Slitvitz but he changed it to Rod Slitvitz when he joined the Kabalarian Society and worked out his numerals.

Somehow Ben and I always had young men like Rod Slitzvitz and Sam and Paul around. Sam, who was constantly analyzing his motives, for instance, would say, ‘You're my surrogate family. I get all the comfort of married life, and none of the worries. I sleep with you vicariously, and at the same time you're my mummy, pure, inviolate, virtuous.' He would come over, say, ‘How's the car?' to Ben, and tell me of his latest love affair. But I suppose the real question is why Ben and I put up with them.

Rod too was in the philosophy seminar and this particular night was to give a paper on the free act. He had come over beforehand, to rehearse it in the front room.

I remember sitting there in the old striped chesterfield, trying to follow Rod's reasoning. He believed that the act occurs without cause, no matter how carefully one can elucidate cause. And to illustrate his point, he drew from his jacket a pistol and shot me.

I see the puff of smoke and a long time later hear the loud crashing bang. And I feel, quite surely, the thud of the bullet hit my chest. Death spreads through me like a visitor. I am immensely weary.

Rod stands there, shaking, a clean-faced boy who never eats meat because he wants to rid himself of lust.

‘Oh I'm sorry,' I say. For I know now that he loves me. There is so much love in the world and all wasted. I look down at my chest, expecting a great spreading patch of red. There is nothing.

‘Blanks,' says Rod unevenly, ‘I rented it this afternoon.'

We both laugh a bit nervously, and I say, ‘But Rod, that doesn't
prove
anything about causality or lack of it.' My god, I'd argue syllogisms on my death bed.

‘I don't care,' Rod says. ‘I'm going to do it tonight. I'm going to shoot the bastard.'

‘Oh god, Rod,' I say. ‘I'm stagnant.'

Rod sat down to consider this bit of news. After a while he said, ‘I'll marry you. But I can't for four years. I have to get my PhD first.'

‘That could be a bit late,' I said and made him supper.

As he munched on his carrot sticks, Rod said, considering, ‘When I'm married, of course, I can go back on meat.'

And we went to the seminar, and Rod shot at Robin, who turned white beneath the spots. And Dr Gowan was puzzled but gave Rod an A.

Rod was the only person I told. He carried the secret around as if it were he who was pregnant.

I went to work every day and I read the
Tractatus
and I mailed off cheques to Berkeley. Ben wrote that he was doing postcards for the tourists and had seen a large statue of the crucifixion.

Sally had her kittens. At first she was more outraged than anything else. Outraged and humiliated, like Winnie, when her water broke. I found her trying pathetically to clean up the mess, scraping at the puddle with her paw. Siamese are the only cats you don't need to housebreak. Terribly anal neurotic. Then she began to whirl around and around, trying to bite whatever it was that was cramping her. She looked up at me indignantly as if it were all my fault.

I'd read in the cat book that you must separate the male from the kittens, for fear he'll kill them. So I put Peter out in the basement and locked the door. By the time I got back to the chesterfield, Sally was mewing nervously. She crawled, broken-backed, into my lap and uttered a long despairing howl, her ears slicked flat against her head. ‘There there, there there, it's going to be all right,' I said. She began to pant laboriously.