Dancing in the Dark (16 page)

There were those moments of impending closeness, when I wanted to pull him entirely into my body, all safe and warm the two of us.

But I admit there were other kinds of moments. It isn’t always easy to concentrate on what is going on. The mind wanders. One thinks things that are frivolous and unrelated. One thinks, maybe, about being almost out of peanut butter or laundry soap, or what to wear to dinner Saturday. One hears the sounds of making love as sounds, and heard that way they may not be terribly attractive. They may be just slaps of perspiring flesh or short rasping breaths.

And sometimes even odder things occur. I remember that sometimes my mind simply moved away, off into a corner of the room, and my eyes were watching as if I were not a part of it at all; the way I could feel our child watching in those days when we were trying so hard to create him.

From that perspective I saw two strange people on the bed, his familiar buttocks shuddering, legs tensing; and up and down, up and down the body moving. Beneath his heaving outstretched body, I could barely see myself, the second person.

Who would be a voyeur, I wondered, seeing things like this?

Just sometimes this happened—not often, really—and only for a few seconds. Then my eyes would rejoin myself beneath him. I did wonder, though, if this were a flaw or some sort of betrayal.

The best was afterward. Then he had time to be tender and slow, he would lie close alongside me and stroke my arms, my back. That is what I miss: the tenderness, gentleness, slowness of him all around me.

Then, too, I could draw my fingers along his jaw, examine his cheekbones in the dark, and find his shoulder blades. There was a dent in the small of his back I liked to reach. Beneath the skin was the hardness of his real body. Like a shell around my own soft one. And my own soft body was a dark cubbyhole for him.

It seemed to fit.

I had almost a horror of him holding me in the night and feeling my flesh sag. This can happen easily, with just a little too much weight: lying on your side, your stomach slides towards the mattress and an arm around you feels that, something soft and pliant, like one of those sea animals that don’t have any spines. Not a nice thing to feel in the night.

So I did my exercises to stay firm and did not eat too much, and I slept with my back to him or with my head in his shoulder but tilted down, so he wouldn’t smell night breath.

I did everything. What didn’t I do?

I got used to the idea that there would be no result from all this but blood. No babies. I thought, “Whatever may be missing inside, at least there are no marks. I have stayed firm.”

I would not have liked the marks, although I might have liked the babies. I suppose I was like Harry in some ways: wanting everything. “You can’t have your cake and eat it too,” my mother used to say with some air of weary knowledge. This seemed true.

I also thought, “If we’d had a child, I wouldn’t be able to do all this.” I meant all the proper care. Instead, there would be playpens, cribs, toys, bottles, boxes of Pablum, and jars of green and yellow baby foods, that acid smell of diapers overlaid with sweet baby powder, all the infant aromas of some of the homes we went to. Then tricycles and bicycles and watching and being scared of something terrible happening, a whole new world of fear, having a child.

Just what I did now was complex enough. I might not be equal to two sets of devotion.

Harry said once after a lingering dinner with wine, our private celebration of a promotion I believe, “I’m glad I don’t have to share you.” I suppose he meant babies.

“Me too.”

But surely he could see I wouldn’t want to share him either?

We seem to have had different sets of rules. I wish I’d thought to ask what his were.

It’s so stupid, such a blindness, not to be able to see him. Twenty years and I see a boy running up behind me on a street, and after that only the sense of a long hard narrow body, a sort of vibration of personality, and a shattering into pieces. Somewhere along the line did I not look?

But we took everything for granted, everything. We never thought.

That house where we lived, that suburb, neat and bleak when we moved in, but after twenty years well treed and flowered—but still neat—it grew up around us. We settled into it like getting comfortable in an easy chair.

We took for granted the big cars traded every other year; the colour television sets as soon as they were on the market; the record player; and later what Harry called the sound system; the very texture of our days.

It’s the texture I can feel, not the events. Parties and dinners and conversations and a cup of coffee with a neighbour in a back yard—all these things happened. We had our little disagreements, which hurt, and I did my work. All of it happened in innocence. And all of it is out of focus now, distorted, like a photograph taken from a strange angle with an odd lens, a different perspective entirely. The innocence isn’t there in the memory; because the ending casts it in a different light. A mushroom cloud, a blaze of eerie brilliance, twenty years illuminated in a different way that could not have been imagined during the living of them.

At the time, the texture was smooth and soft, like a velvety robe you step into after a bath on a chilly day.

I think I can say with confidence that
we
took it all for granted, that
we
did not think. It must be true for him as well; because if he had thought, if he had not assumed, he could never have dared, could never have risked it, or me, or himself. To take such a leap as he did—well, it can only be done from a trusted, taken-for-granted base.

Unless, of course, he didn’t care at all. But he wasn’t such a liar as that. He lied, but not like that.

He must have changed, though, in other ways than new glasses and stooping shoulders. I aged and changed, whatever my efforts, and of course he must have too. Grey hairs, lines, a dragging of the skin, these things must have happened to him as well.

If I failed to see all that, what about invisible changes?

Is that what he thought, that I failed to see him? Did he just want somebody to look?

It could as easily be the reverse, for all I know. He might have thought I saw too well, or too much, and wanted a little time to be invisible.

It wasn’t so much time. A small portion of our years.

When I lie in bed looking up, what I see are white ceiling tiles. I’ve counted the holes in them, which is not an easy thing to do. You get a certain way along and the holes blur and two of them seem to jump together and you have to start again. But by going slowly and patiently along the lines, I have counted twenty-three along each side. Each corner hole, of course, is counted twice, once for each of the two sides it connects.

With such exercises I refine myself.

When I brush my teeth, I draw an inch of toothpaste along the bristles. On a bad day, when someone else brushes my teeth, a little less is likely to be used. I brush before and after breakfast, and then not until bedtime. I used to smoke occasionally, but here they don’t permit matches; so my breath, I imagine, is better and there’s no great need to brush during the day. Is an inch of toothpaste every time wasteful? Or countered by only brushing three times a day?

Harry said, “You look great.” Or “How about the red dress Friday?” But he might have preferred me to have scars or birthmarks or wear more make-up or dress differently. He might have liked a change.

Sometimes he said, “Edna, are you okay?” and I didn’t know what he meant. “I mean,” he’d say, “you just stay home. Are you okay?” and he’d have a worried, puzzled look.

Did he not want me to vacuum every day or wipe the toaster? Did he want me to be the life of all the parties? People still complimented him, he told me, on his small dark quiet listening wife. I couldn’t be everything. He embraced the person I was, and yet there were those times when the person I was seemed to concern him.

But he wouldn’t have liked to have no clean shirts, or to see dirty dishes in the sink.

So just what did he want, anyway? What more did he want?

There are so many interruptions here. That’s a hard thing to get used to, after so many years of privacy.

They come in and say, “Come on now, it’s time for breakfast.” Or lunch, or dinner. “Okay, Edna, let’s have your bath now.” And “Time to go see the doctor,” which is one I don’t mind so much, although it’s sometimes inconvenient, sometimes I am in the middle of something here.

“Lights out, Edna,” they say at night. “Time to put the pen down now.”

It’s tiring, all this work, all this writing, all this picking apart of things. They only give me sleeping pills on the bad days. Otherwise I sleep quite well, except for waking up sometimes in the middle of the night and reaching for the missing warm part. All my habits have been broken here, except for that one drowsy one.

At the end of a day my eyes burn, and my right wrist, my fingers, feel all cramped and sore from the steady, tidy writing.

But it makes me uneasy to have the lights out, to go to sleep. I can’t write in the dark, so maybe I miss things? With
the pen I might be able to follow falling asleep, for instance, to see how that happens.

Other times, too, the pen and the notebook are inaccessible. At meals they don’t let me have them and it’s hard to write the details from memory, hard to pay enough attention to remember adequately. How exactly it feels, moving a spoon to the mouth.

And in the bath, another place I can’t take the notebook, may there not be some sensation of water and soap and skin forgotten?

There are so many things to put down. Right here in this chair there are so many things. And then I drift off and write down other things as well. I still do not pay attention well enough. But I see a good deal better than I used to. I’m developing a better eye for detail than I ever had before.

I
used to wonder sometimes why people like Harry were given holidays. Like money, I suppose, they represent reward, accomplishment. In the early days of our marriage we’d not had a great deal of money, but enough, and a couple of weeks’ vacation was not much but enough. Then, as the years went on, we had more and more money, more than enough, and the weeks of holiday expanded too and were also much more than enough.

Vacations are for doing. One is supposed to see new things, rest, and break patterns, and return refreshed to ordinary labours. But what is it one is supposed to do?

Go away, travel, leave home. But home was where my life was; leaving there, to drive across the country or to fly to Florida or California or some Caribbean island was to be nowhere at all. We ate different kinds of fruit and drank different kinds of drinks. We stayed in hotels where other people, maids, changed the sheets and cleaned the toilets and where there was likely a view of a beach from the balcony. We could rent cars to drive along rutted roads, or read books beside a hotel pool, stretched out on lounge chairs in our
bathing suits and sunglasses. We could walk along sand at sunset. We could look like pictures on a travel poster.

But my hands were empty when we were away. They missed what they should be doing. They missed holding dishcloths and food. They lacked purpose, and didn’t know what to do with themselves.

Harry, too, may have felt that, because his fingers sometimes drummed on tables while we waited for drinks, and he would break into a run along a beach, leaving me behind, and at night would fling himself onto a hotel bed and sometimes sigh. He would wonder what was happening with some deal at the office, or how he ought to solve some problem. A holiday often seemed to be empty time, an uncomfortable pause.

We went together to Jamaica, Barbados, St. Lucia, Hawaii. Once we went to Mexico, and another time, daringly, on a package tour to Cuba, which we thought would be a stern and exotic place. But it did not seem so different. From hotels and beaches, the view is much the same.

We went to California and walked different kinds of streets and beaches and stared around for movie stars. And Florida. It was heat and water that attracted us, the antidote to winter cold and grey and snow. Like birds, we migrated south.

We drove, in summers, through New England and northern Ontario and to both coasts, planning itineraries, drawing lines on maps, scanning guides for good hotels. Mainly we were not drawn to big cities, although in the spring or fall Harry might take some extra days and we’d fly to New York, stay in some safe hotel, and journey out to dinner and the theatre. We did not walk there, of course. The dangers were too well known. North America in general seemed too familiar, because we were alert to what could happen. What could
happen in other places, we could not be sure, so travelled there more freely.

It was nice to see the plays. In the dark, except for the coughing and some murmuring, it was almost private, like watching a drama from our living room. And in the dark I could see myself up on the stage.

They also gave us conversation. We could go back to our room and put up our feet and order from room service and talk about performances. When we got home, Harry liked telling people what we’d seen and done. The luxury of being able to do these things, fly to New York for a four-day weekend, appealed to both of us.

(Did she miss him when we went away? Did he miss her? There were meetings Harry went to out of town. Did she go with him, were those their holidays?)

We did not always go away though. Sometimes Harry took a week or two and stayed home, puttering around the house. He put in gardens and painted rooms and once sanded down a table and refinished it. Every day or so he’d call his office, or someone from there would call him, which both pleased him and kept his mind on work, which seemed to make him both more tense and more content.

Those holidays at home were odd for me, too. He came into the kitchen wanting a sandwich or a beer and it was midday, when he shouldn’t have been there at all. Sounds were disorienting—coughs and hammering, footsteps and his voice, when normally there would be silence. My treats were deferred. Certainly I could not put on records in the afternoon, lie down on the couch, close my eyes, and dance.