Crossings (9 page)

The key turns in the lock and he bangs into the entry hall. A great thick red-faced man in khaki. A man with a bald head. He sees me and he does a double-take. But it is a joke. I laugh.

‘You the landlady?' he says.

This is after the five-day bash. He tells me later he expected the lock to be changed.

‘Yes.'

‘You don't look like a landlady,' he says.

I laugh. He laughs. That's the start.

Mik wasn't bald. I just looked through my I. Magnin box of old photographs and found the one of Mik and me.

It's a street picture. There's a sign behind us, over our heads. You can see 'ancy's.' And another sign: 'ot donuts.' Mik is two steps ahead of me, and I am leaning over, listing to starboard, so that I disappear behind his shoulder. He is wearing the sports jacket and trousers we bought that day with Ben's credit card. Not the day of the picture. That other day. The shirt collar seems to be too tight. Perhaps the top button is gone. The tie is sub­dued, with two small flecks. The sports jacket is also too small. It is wrinkled across his middle. The trousers appear to be black or dark blue. Surely not. And Mik has a tuft of hair right at the top of his head, and a little on each side, over the ears. Oddly, the tuft at the top doesn't vitiate the Mr Clean look at all. He stares at the camera, his right hand cupped, the cigarette turned inwards to his palm, a genie in mufti.

Sometimes people, going through my I. Magnin box, say, ‘Is
that you?
' for I weigh 112 in that shot. And then, ‘Who's
that?
' I always mutter something and shove the picture under the others, ashamed, as if it were an atrocity photo.

I am a person who remembers what I've paid for everything. The black winter coat I have on cost forty-eight dollars. When I bought it, I thought, ‘Grace and Terence will approve. It's in good taste, anyway.' The handbag is a closely woven wicker with leather straps. It cost forty pesos in Guadalajara, one of the ex­pensive shops on the Avenida de la Revolución. It was a lot of money in Mexico, but only five dollars really. I went hot all over when I paid so much. I want to say Ben disapproved, but in fact I think he said, ‘Go ahead. If you want it so much.' I saw it later in the Village Square for twenty-five. I remember how much I paid for Ben's suede jacket. Four hundred pesos. And the black suit I got him with my first short story money. Fifty in Bellingham, on sale.

But I cannot, even for consistency, tell you how much I paid for the clothes Mik is wearing in the photograph. Later, I will ap­proximate the sum, when I ask for the money back, but I will never remember.

The clerk in Eaton's Men's Department took one look at us and called the manager. There was a long confab about the credit card.

‘It's my husband's,' I said.

And Mik said, grinning dangerously, ‘I'm her little boy.'

They couldn't refuse us. Ben's credit was good. I paid promptly every month.

Mik picked out the sports jacket, the trousers. Grey. Dark grey. Now I remember. And a couple of shirts and socks. The tie. Not that tie. Not the one with the two flecks. Another. A thin grey tie. And a lovely soft yellow wool cardigan which he ruined by tossing for its first wash in a coin machine.

‘Will you take them or wear them? Sir,' said the clerk.

‘I'll wear them. Sonny,' said Mik.

‘Will you need underwear? Sir?'

‘Yah. You run over and scrounge me a couple of …'

I can't remember. I never took notes on Mik. Something out­rageous.

Mik has his head out the curtains of the dressing room. He winks at me. ‘What size?' says the clerk. ‘For the jockey shorts? Sir.'

Mik gives him a look. ‘Big.'

After, we are waiting at the counter for the clerk to wrap Mik's old things. He makes a great business of it, folding the khaki as if it were Harris tweed, enclosing the raggedy shorts with a piece of tissue paper before he raises them, with a small shudder, and puts them too into the package. Mik takes the neatly wrapped, carefully knotted, brown paper container from the clerk. ‘Thank you veddy much,' he says, clicking his heels and making a Prus­sian bow. His hand comes up, his great fingers holding the knot daintily, his pinky crooked skywards, and drops the package in­to the waste bin beneath the clerk's nose.

The clerk sucks in his breath.

‘Not at all, my good man,' Mik says and we are off down the aisle, not looking at each other, afraid to look for fear of the laughter inside us, walking very casually toward the shoe department.

That first day, Mik says, ‘You don't look like a landlady.'

‘Will you be wanting dinner tonight?'

‘No. Oh no. I just have to get something from my suitcase.'

While he's upstairs Gladys phones.

‘Have you seen the reviews?' she carols.

‘Just this morning's.'

‘The
Sun
's is better,' she says. ‘But at least MacPherson under­stood the phrasing. Herbert did his proverbial roll in the aisle about the big voice bit. As if lieder singers should have big voices! But he's a well-known idiot, MacPherson. We've been counting up the ticket money and I think I can pay you back and make a profit too! Thirteen dollars and fifty cents.'

‘That's wonderful.'

‘Vicky, thanks for everything. Really. Hey, where did you get to this morning?'

‘I had an appointment with the Nut Lady.'

‘Oh. Gosh, I got up and I thought you were mad at me or some­thing.'

‘No. I, I thought you were, I thought maybe you'd be upset by the review.'

‘Oh Vicky, don't be silly. They're good reviews really. Were
you
upset?'

‘Yes. A little.'

Somewhere in all this, Mik leaves again, having checked his suit­case and found it completely untampered with, all the news­papers intact. There is some special way you can do this. With a hair laid a certain way across the inside of the lock. I forget.

The next day he moves in for good.

 

IT BOTHERS ME, that I lied about the wood stove up at the island. It seemed true when I wrote it. It seemed real that I did not know how to make a fire. I could see the smoke filling the cabin and Mik's disgusted face, puffed up and shiny with rage. I could see the balled-up pieces of newspaper, blackened and charred, the fire gone out. Perhaps I was transposing time and space, for when I began with the furnace in the house I did make mistakes. It took me a long time to become expert. I had a chopping block in the cellar. Paul got it for me. And I would put on my gardening gloves and set up the kindling and wham! precisely with the axe. It was very satisfying. I could keep the furnace going for almost twenty-four hours with only two or three visits to the cellar during the day and one last thing at night.

And yet I
know
I was totally useless with that wood stove on the island. At first I thought, Oh yes, it was the helpless lady bit, when I remembered at first, I mean. But it wasn't just that. In some way, more true than simple lying, I
was
helpless. I let it go out. Mik was angry with me. That also is true, and yet, how could it be?

Sister Mary Joseph says to me: ‘You are obsessed with truth.'

The Nut Lady said to me: ‘You tell me a fact and you think that is truth.'

When I was five, my mother caught me holding myself Down There. I was galloping through the house, giddyap, giddyap.

‘What are you doing?' she said with that tight face my mother gets.

I took one look at her face and knew I must have been doing something heinous, something dirty.

‘I was thinking of the devil,' I said.

I lie awake for a week of nights. In a cold sweat of guilt. It seems to me I have never been so wicked. I realize at last that I must confess. I will do it first thing in the morning. I cannot live with it anymore.

I go out into the kitchen. Linoleum on the floor. Maroon flow­ers. Worn in places, cracked. Under the sink, ghastly oozes of grey. Children see all the filth grownups can't: the undersides of things that aren't cleaned. I say, ‘It was a horse.'

‘What?'

‘A horse. Not the devil. I was thinking of a horse.'

But she doesn't remember and gets cross all over again. Says, ‘Don't be silly.'

My mother hated liars.

Jeff says, about the book, ‘Oddly enough, I'm sure it will bear no resemblance to life at all. No one need worry in the slightest. You have always fictionalized everything that has ever happened to you. You make it up as you go along.'

 

MIK MOVES IN. I am working on a play about a man from the sea. He plays chess. So I must learn chess. I ask Paul to teach me.

I learn slowly. Paul explains the fool's mate carefully, over and over, but I keep opening to it. Finally, to teach me a lesson, Paul lets me play on, still in check. In the middle, when I think I am doing well for once, he says, ‘Of course, you've been in check for seventeen moves.'

I sweep the pieces from the board. ‘You bastard! You rotten bastard. You're banished for a week. I mean it. Get out of here!' And I go upstairs and slam the door. A tantrum. I have had a tantrum. Typically, Paul stays away a week.

Paul was Jocelyn's friend first. But he sort of glommed onto me. He is twenty-two then, and he too lives at Ivan's and Marie's. He and Ben get together and cluck over me, work out my problems, my neuroses. Paul is German and good looking, until he opens his mouth or walks. He has the classic fruit mince, up on the tippytoes. He can't help it, his father has the same walk. It's a deformity like any other but unhappily lacking in the ability to evoke sympathy. He is living off unemployment insurance while he gets ready to be a great writer. He is compiling a system of filing card references on Savonarola; this he does while listening to Wagner. Full blast. One day he is going to write the definitive three-act play on Savonarola. He finds me distressingly commercial. ‘I can't see any point in being second rate,' he says.

Paul is the only person I know who consciously cultivates the art of the insult. He works on a crushing retort for days and then, having delivered it, rushes over to tell Jocelyn and me: ‘You should have seen the look on his face.'

Ivan and Marie have other boarders. One is a poor boy taking his grade twelve from Surepass, the cram-for-exam school. Paul puts a poster on his door: ‘Anus Mundi' and tells the boy it means ‘Genius of the world.'

We are in the kitchen washing up. Paul is snorting into the dish pan.

‘Actually, the language of the lower class is terribly rich in meta­phor. It makes one consider the possibility that there is genius in the language. But my god! I hope you're taking notes, Vicky. What a find!'

At dinner I have mixed up
incubus
with
succubus,
and Paul has corrected me.

‘Don't you mean he's an incubus?' My man from the sea.

‘What's the difference?' Mik says.

‘I beg your pardon?' says Paul, affecting to notice Mik for the first time.

‘This whatsit? What you said, what's the difference?'

‘The incubus is the male tempter,' Paul says. ‘The succubus is the female of the species. She works at night.' He gives me a look to see if I see how clever he is.

Mik finishes his potato. He was a prodigious eater of potatoes. He put them whole into his mouth. ‘Yah,' he says. ‘I knew one once. You mean a lady gorgonzola.'

‘A what?' says Paul, delighted.

‘A lady gorgonzola,' says Mik, spearing another potato. ‘Ain't that what you're talking about? Them guys run the boats in Venice. I knew one once, a lady gorgonzola, she run this gorgon up and down the carnals in Naples.'

I refuse to look up from my plate. I know Paul is bursting with glee. I sneak a glance at Jocelyn and she has a small curved speculative smile on her face.

‘I believe the word is “gondolier,”' says Paul.

‘Yes,' says Mik, ‘that's the word.'