Crossings (37 page)

‘He sounds all right.' And then I say, ‘Look, do you need any money?'

 

I SAY TO Mik, that spring in the apartment, ‘Look. I've got to get this done. Let's hold down the coffee shop visits for a few days. I'll call you.'

I've forgotten what
this
is. Whatever it is, it has me in its clutch. Aunt and Uncle Forbes are here, and I go with them to Stanley Park once, but I begrudge the time, the loss of intensity. I move about the cages like a zombie, my head full of words. They are staying somewhere. I forget. A hotel.

I work. I don't call Mik. I fall into bed exhausted. I get up. I work.

The telephone rings. I stagger out to the desk. In a pair of old flannelette pajamas. I see the clock.

‘It's two o'clock in the morning!'

‘You said you'd call.'

‘Mik, it's two o'clock. I was
asleep
.'

‘I been waiting.'

‘Mik, I was
asleep.
It's two
o'clock
.' It's all I can think of. Indignation rises in me like a pure column of flame. ‘It's two o'clock in the
morning!
'

‘You said you'd call. I been waiting.'

And then I say it the second time. ‘Go fuck yourself.' I mean it precisely. ‘Go fuck your
self
.' I know what the words mean now.

And I hang up and go back to bed. Falling asleep instantly. Innocent as angels.

Mik comes right through the door. He just comes through it. When I see it later, it is knocked clear off its hinges, and there is a great clean gash of wood where the lock used to be. Someone has leaned it up against the wall by the time I see it.

Mik tells me much later that he threw the knife away as he came down the road.

The man who lives upstairs comes down and stands on the back porch and listens. He is afraid to do anything. He doesn't want to get involved. ‘I thought maybe it was a lovers' quarrel,' he says later. ‘The language was terrible.'

I don't remember the language. I remember Mik saying, over and over, ‘You're just like my mother.'

It is hard to remember pain. When you're in it you don't want it. There is something terribly degrading about pain. It makes you into something sub-human, something just wanting to be let go. A shriek of Let Me Go. You'd press all the buttons in the world, and a hundred million Chinamen would die and you wouldn't give a damn, if only It will stop. Sartre says you never know whether you're a coward or not until you face torture. Well, I'm a coward. I'd have named names, sacrificed the whole world, even my family. Other than that—knowing that—I don't remember. I remember thinking, with a sort of surprise, that I hadn't lost consciousness. I thought you did, if it got too bad.

I remember not wanting to die. That is very clear. I do not want to die.

And then it is over. Mik is gone. I am up. I am wearing a blue blouse. God knows how I did that. Or why. The landlord is standing in the kitchen. He is saying, ‘This sort of thing can't go on.'

I laugh.

The police come.

I phone Edna and then a cab. I go to her place. It is dawn now. The birds are chittering as I walk around to the back where her door is.

‘Your face!' she says when she opens the door.

I have been beaten up. It happens to women. I've read about it. I thought it had happened before. But it hadn't. Not a real beating up.

I am afraid of Mik. I've never been afraid of anyone in my life. Not that way. Not in my bones.

I go back in the morning. The door is still up against the wall. The telephone is ringing. It rings and rings and rings. It doesn't stop.

The mirror is broken. In the eight dollar vanity. Yes. He brought back the bull and threw it against the mirror. The ear is gone.

Walking down Robson Street. Mik sees it in a window. A carved wooden bull. Red wood. A beautiful thing. So expensive. And I go back, the next week, and buy it for him. Now he has thrown it in the mirror.

I pick up the ear.

The telephone rings and rings. It doesn't stop.

I go down to the corner and phone Uncle Forbes' hotel.

They come.

Uncle Forbes says, ‘A man doesn't do that unless he has a reason.'

Aunt Forbes says, ‘Well, Vicky said he's got a silver plate in his head. From the war.'

Uncle Forbes says, ‘You must have encouraged him.'

Aunt Forbes says, ‘Vicky was just trying to be
kind.
He just got the wrong impression.'

She says I must go home to my mother.

I telephone the Nut Lady to say I am leaving.

‘I think you'd better come out and see me,' she says. She sounds cross.

I sit there in her office and she is very far away, and very tall. Elegant and tall and her mouth purses like my mother's. ‘You'll have to charge him,' she says.

I shake my head. ‘Go home,' I say.

‘No,' she says. And for an instant, she looks almost frightened. But then she is herself again. ‘I'm going to lay it on the line, Vicky. Either you charge him or you're out on your ear. I'll have nothing more to do with you.'

I go away. The landlord is fixing the door. Aunt Forbes says she will call the head of the clinic. A friend of hers. She will protest such nonsense. ‘The man is dangerous.' She prescribes poultices.

Her friend tells her he never interferes in his therapists' cases.

I go over to Edna's and sit around.

Finally I go down to the police station.

‘Were you living common law?' says the man at the desk.

‘Not now,' I say. It hurts to speak. Everything hurts. ‘Before.'

He shrugs. ‘Look, lady. I've seen this sort of thing before. You'll charge him and then you'll change your mind.'

I think maybe he is right. I go away without signing the form.

The door is fixed. The lady across the way calls to me: ‘Your phone has been ringing and ringing.'

I feed the cats.

Aunt Forbes phones the Nut Lady. ‘She can't just stay here in this apartment, all alone.' She won't believe it's my fault.

‘He's a criminal. He should be put away,' she argues.

‘I've been in the Army myself,' Uncle Forbes says, eyeing me speculatively.

‘Don't be silly,' Aunt Forbes says. ‘You know what Vicky is. Always taking in stray cats. And then, she's a divorcée. He just got the wrong idea. Men do, they get funny ideas about women who are divorced. It's a shame you had to take men boarders, couldn't you have got a woman?'

‘He answered the ad,' I say.

‘Well, you keep those poultices on,' she says. ‘It's really just bruises. Your teeth will probably firm themselves.'

‘She was lucky,' Uncle Forbes says gloomily.

He's right. I am. I always have been.

I let three days go by. I can't sleep. I tremble when the phone rings and rings and rings. I start at the slightest sound. I am waiting for something.

The landlord says, ‘You had better charge him. I can't have this sort of thing going on.'

Aunt Forbes and Uncle Forbes have to leave. Aunt Forbes goes inveighing against the incomprehensible arbitrariness of the Nut Lady. Uncle Forbes says, ‘She must have led him on. I've been in the Army.'

I know she means it, the Nut Lady. If I don't, I can't go back. She'll kick me out. She means it.

I go down to the police station. I speak to the public prosecutor. I sign the form.

I go back to the apartment and I sleep.

I go to see the Nut Lady.

‘You can move,' she says grimly. ‘But I wasn't having you run home, like a baby.'

‘It was wrong of you. To force me to that. It was wrong. It was a bad move.'

‘Perhaps,' she says. ‘I make mistakes sometimes.'

‘I just want to say that this time you've been wrong.'

‘All right.'

And the days go by. The phone has stopped ringing, but I get an unlisted number anyway.

I go back to work. The face fades. I can't remember how I looked then.

Ben comes over and takes the Medusa head outside into the area where the garbage cans are kept. He puts the head into a garbage can and, with a hammer, smashes it to pieces. ‘I realize now,' he says, ‘I was possessed of the devil when I did that. It was evil.' He is destroying everything he has made in the past two years. He invites me to come to see his studio … to see the portrait of the mad woman before he cuts it. ‘It glows in the dark. You can see the devil,' he says. But I don't go.

Paul comes over and brings the chess champion from the university. We draw.

A serious Chinese boy, a political science candidate. Very fond of puns. ‘The pigeons are very active in your alley,' the Chinese boy says. ‘Foul of them.' Then he chuckles, enormously pleased with himself.

After we draw, he says to me, ‘Next Sunday?' And we agree to play next Sunday.

I work hard and on Sunday I play a game of chess. Sometimes Paul is there too. He plays one of us first and then the other takes him on, but it is between me and the Chinese boy. He says to me, ‘You are very imaginative.'

‘And you care for nothing,' I say. ‘You hold no brief for your Queen or your knights.'

‘My nights have no queen,' he says and chuckles. Then he considers. ‘No.' He watches the board. ‘I will tell you. My weakness. I am a Marxist. I care for the pawns. If you are to beat me, you will have to do it with the end game. I care for the pawns.'

It is true. He cares for his pawns. I work on the end game but I never beat him. He sacrifices his pawns. He knows his weakness.

Life goes on. Everything passes.

One day I am walking down Broadway and I see a brown khaki shapeless man rolling toward me. I stop dead in my tracks. He stops in his.

We look at each other, from half a block away. I hear him laugh. And I laugh too. We stand there, not able to see each other's faces, but laughing. Like lunatics. Then I turn and go on back to the apartment.

The telephone rings. How is that possible? I have changed the number.

It must have been later then. That I changed the number. Because the telephone rings and I answer it.

‘'S me,' he says.

I say he can't come to the apartment. The landlord will phone the police. I say I will meet him at a coffee shop.

‘I'm back across the bridge,' he says. ‘Taking a course. You know. Maintenance engineer.'

‘What happened?'

‘You dumb broad. Nothing. They put me away for a night, and in the morning my mother put up the peace bond. I could have come back anytime. You think that stopped me?'

‘I thought they'd locked you up and thrown away the key.'

‘“Disturbing the Peace,”' he says with a sneer.

So that's what I must have signed. Yes. I did.

‘I threw away the knife when I was humping it down the road. I threw it away. That was nothing. You think that was something?'

Yes, I had thought it was something. ‘I thought you were serious.'

‘Nah. All they did, they phoned me up and said they had a bench warrant out for me and to wait, they were coming to pick me up.'

‘They
phoned
you? The police?'

‘Sure.'

‘How did they know where to find you?'

I forget what he answers.

‘I felt such a Judas,' I say.

‘Naw. You were just mad.'

‘No. I was scared.'

‘You? Scared of
me?
' He doesn't believe it. ‘I wouldn't hurt you.'

I was scared. But I don't tell him. I thank him for the coffee and I go back to the apartment.

A week later he phones and asks me for coffee again. I go. This time, there is a bubbling inside me. He says, ‘Come to my place,' and I go.

A little bed sitting room, only blocks away from my place.

Cretonne on the easy chair. Bright sunlight through the window. A canary in a cage. And, from the library, a book:
How to Write for TV and Radio.

Oh Mik.

We make love. He uses a safe. We are quiet because of the landlady.

‘I been seeing this woman.'

‘Why are you talking like that?'

‘Like what?'

‘“Been seeing?”'

‘She's all right. Thirty-five. Had a tough time. I fixed her kitchen cupboards for her.'

‘Just don't talk like that to me.'

‘We get along. It's not the same, but she's had a tough time.'

A week later, he phones and says, ‘I'm getting married. Tomorrow.'

‘To that woman you told me about?'

‘Yah.'

‘I hope you'll be very happy.' And ‘Congratulations.'

‘Look. Let's see each other before, eh? Look. You don't have to worry. It'll be neutral territory. Bring Edna. I'll bring George. See me before. At noon. The Aristocrat.'

Edna and I walk down to the Aristocrat at noon the next day. Mik is already there with George. My stomach won't have anything to do with the food. I have to excuse myself and go to the washroom.