Dancing in the Dark (8 page)

So I didn’t understand his body, no. But I thought the act
in general was of the heart, not of the body, and that those parts of us down there were symbols, ways of showing, and not the thing itself.

“I love you,” we told each other before and after. During, even he was mute.

A
nd then there we were, married, and there I was safe on the other side of twenty and the gap. A leap hand in hand with Harry, like in a movie.

Twenty years between then and the appearance of another gap and a leap into danger again. Still, twenty years of safety.

What if he hadn’t asked? But I was sure he would.

I was sure he had to. From the first moment, his presence, his existence, blocked the world. I could not see it, nor could it touch me. He surrounded me, was in every direction I looked, filling up my view.

Once we went to a public beach and, far out in the water, standing up and moving with the waves, made love. It must have been apparent, if anyone had looked, what we were doing; and I never thought of that. Or if I did, it was only that a watcher would be far off and anonymous, while here was Harry. We were invisible, or our passion must have blinded people. We were all that existed, our twined-together two-ness made all the world our own possession, unreal except as we might admit it. It was delicious, this satisfying protection we made together.

Did I fill up his view that way? I suppose I didn’t. He may have been keeping an eye on the beach over my shoulder.

What if he hadn’t asked? If I’d gone out and found a job, taught English all these years, hating it I’m sure, putting my own pay cheques in the bank, paying rent on some small apartment somewhere, watching, watching all the time all the ordinary people, coveting their ordinariness—would I choose that if I could undo how this has ended?

I had twenty years. I can’t see giving them up. The thing is to see how much was true.

He was quite a while working up to asking. Sometimes I saw him watching me in a speculative way, and I thought I knew what he was wondering. I did my best; was my best. And finally, I guess, he too found it the only thing to be done, came to my conclusion (but by what route?), took a deep breath, said, “Let’s get married.”

He sat beside me on my old couch-cot, holding both my hands, turned towards me, looking at me, more than that, into me—was he trying to see through and past me into the future, to calculate the risk?

“But before you answer,” he was saying, “we have to have an understanding.” I nodded willingly. Whatever.

“The thing is, I’m scared of feeling trapped. I know myself, and I know I can’t take that feeling. So if we’re going to do the paper and promises, I want to be sure they won’t make any difference. I know you let me be, but sometimes that can change when people get married, and I have to be able to feel free. I don’t want to have to answer to anybody.”

“But,” I protested, “have I ever?”

No, I was careful. I said, “Don’t worry about it, that’s fine,” when he called to say he had to study or was going out for a
drink with some friends. I would never have said, “Oh, but I was counting on you. I have nothing else to do.”

“No, of course you haven’t, or we wouldn’t still be together. Look, I’ll tell you what I think: if I had to feel responsible I’d resent it, and when I resent something I get mad and then I blow up and get the hell away from whatever it is. See?

“But if I don’t feel any demands, I can give you everything. I’ll want to give you everything. It’s just a matter of whether I feel forced or not. I have to want to want to.

“Do you see what I mean at all? I know I’m putting it badly. I didn’t mean to, I had it all worked out how to say it, but I got off the track,” and he gave me that appealing, tippy little smile he had, where one side of his mouth went up and the skin around his eyes wrinkled around them, so that he was kind of peeking, like a little boy.

Well yes, I could see in a way what he meant, looking at it from his point of view and knowing him as I did.

Me, I was the opposite. I longed for the obligations and the demands. They would fence my life.

One would think that would make us fit perfectly together. It did seem to.

Still, I was a little hurt that he could apparently foresee me so easily as a burden. On the other hand, he was honest at least. “But I love you,” I said, as if that would explain everything.

“I love you, too,” he said and smiled and leaned forward and kissed my forehead.

When we made love, I could feel the perfect infinite future of this. It made it a much larger event.

I never broke the promise. Whatever else, I never broke that promise. It hardly even seemed to matter that I had
made it. He told me so much: it didn’t seem possible there could be any secrets.

He broke it. I never did.

In those days, one pledged to “love, honour, and obey,” although I gather that has now changed and one can promise what one wants. Or not. Sometimes it seems no one promises anything any more.

But I took the pledge for granted; welcomed it, in fact.

What about him? Was he frightened, despite our private pact, of love, honour, and obedience? Did he look at me uneasily and wonder what he might be giving up?

I was uneasy and afraid. I was afraid I might not be good enough, that my alertness might falter for a moment, and like a broken spell, all this would vanish.

I felt I was being called to perfection (and it was just like that, a vocation, something one is called to—by whom? what?) and I might not measure up. I added more private, silent promises: to be indispensable and absolute.

Obviously I failed. Obviously there were things missed, the small pin lodged in the carpet. I did not try quite hard enough, although I did try very hard.

I’m sure I could have been perfect, with more effort. And then Harry might have been perfect too. As it was, there were flaws and shortcomings, and his faults, although more glaring and gashing, were only reflections of my own.

“Ah, you’re perfect, Edna,” he told me sometimes. But I was not.

So much hung on that day we were married: all my unhappy, forlorn past and all our brilliant, sturdy future. There would have had to be great fireworks, explosions in the sky, and rumblings and upheavals in the earth, to be the day it meant to me.

Of course there were not. But I was dazed by expectations. They were: that marrying Harry resolved—everything. I would work hard at it, true, but it was work I could understand and could do and that had a purpose. I was safe, inside two, and questions and fear had no place any more; might even be a kind of wickedness, betrayal. That is what twenty years meant, although at the time I pictured it forever.

So much fussing, and none to do with the point of all this. Stella pushing and pulling at my hair, my mother tugging at my dress. They worried about the flowers for the church and whether the guests would all be seated properly. They went over the order of people in the receiving line, and were nervous when the photographer was late. But it was all for me, they were on my side: they too wanted this to be perfect.

I would have liked to stop. To sit alone for a while in my bedroom and let what it meant soak into me, to absorb it until I could feel it fill me.

But there was no time, and no quiet.

“If I can remember everything,” I thought, “I’ll be able to go over it later as much as I want.” But while I could, and did many times, the recollection was as unreal as the reality.

To be married, wasn’t that something, now. I couldn’t even look at Harry in the ceremony. He would have to be enormous, fill up the church to its gilded rafters, to be what he meant.

I overheard my mother saying, “Isn’t it nice to see Edna so happy and relaxed.” I was frantic with excitement, which may have been similar to happiness. But I was certainly not relaxed. This was my life here, didn’t she see?

I heard Harry’s voice beside me in the ceremony and felt his hand on my elbow as we walked back up the aisle. His
arm rested alongside mine in the receiving line, and at the reception I heard him laughing and talking beside me, and felt him pulling me to my feet when they tinkled the glasses for a kiss. We were our own magic circle in the midst of all this, but I closed my eyes.

I lay awake that night listening to my husband breathe beside me. I’d lain awake before, listening to Harry breathe, but this was new: Harry my husband, my husband Harry.

It seems to me that what he was saying that day was, “In return for this, I get that.” And what I was saying was, “In return for this, I will always have that.”

W
hat did he see? What did he see all those years?

Oh God, I want to know. I want him here. I want to talk to him and ask him, I want him to tell me what it was all about and what he saw. I want to know why.

It must have been quite different from my view. That’s what’s shattering, how different it must have been.

If we could talk now, we could tell the truth.

I guess I miss Harry. I suppose I mourn him in a way. Although I can’t quite grasp it.

But what I do miss is his presence. We could sit and chat, I miss that, just the sound of his voice, even a conversation about what to watch on television, even that I would cherish. We could sit on the couch together, him with a newspaper or a magazine, me with a book. The quietness. I took the ordinary quietness for granted. I would like to see him reach forward to pour another glass of wine, or to light my cigarette. I would like to be out in the car with him, hear him cursing another driver or singing with the radio. I’d like to hear him arguing with one of the men from his office. I’d like to hear him say, “Another drink, Don? How about you, Lois?” when
we had company. I would like to see him gulping orange juice in the morning, saying, “Jesus Christ, I’m late.” I would like to hear his car in the driveway, the garage door opening and closing, his “Hi, Edna, God what a day, feel like a drink?” I would like to feel his hand touch my shoulder lightly or see him grin as he grabbed my breasts or pinched my bottom as he passed by me. I would like once again to lie awake in the night listening to him breathe. I would like to be wakened by a snore. I would like to be cleaning the bathroom in the morning and smell his aftershave, and to fold his pyjamas beneath his pillow. I would like to pull the covers off our vacant bed and see the imprint of his body, both our bodies, and know they would be there again. I would like to empty the ashtray, filled with the butts of our cigarettes. Where did it all go? I would like to reach back and have it all again.

T
hey say it’s nearly the middle of October. What good are pages and pages of neat, precise letters spiralling into tidy words and paragraphs, if they only look good? Underneath it is a mess.

I must look more closely, pay more attention, see everything. All the details and the tiny things, that must be where it is.

So I note, sitting here in this flowered chair, notebook squarely in my lap, my back rigid against the cushioned softness, that some leaves are falling.

The ones that fall are darker than the others and seem to be more crinkled at the edges. Far away are the pine trees, but these closer ones are maples, shades of green, red, yellow, and orange, some brown, all melting through the limbs.

If I watch carefully from day to day, and this is the sort of concentration that is required, I should be able to see a single leaf altering: the green fading to the other colours and then the winding and twisting to the earth. First small yellow blotches, then one of the deeper colours; or for some, merely a swift passage to dull brown. The veins turn dark.
When the bright colours begin to turn dull, the stems weaken and the leaves lose their grip. Today it is windy, and many of them are falling, some perhaps prematurely, because of the wind. On the ground it doesn’t take long until they’re dry and flaky.

There is one there, holding on, almost a perfect deep red, easy to spot. The branch it’s on is whipping in the wind, and most of the other leaves around it have already given up and gone. This one tosses, but does not let go.

The brilliant red leaf struggles stubbornly and dumbly. Can a small leaf beat the wind? It sways and curls upward with the force, straining at its frail connection to the branch, the trunk, the roots.

A small leaf cannot beat the wind. A stronger gust catches at its weakest point, there is a last tug, and it is drifting, drifting away and down, resting gently in a perfect landing on the ground. Now it’s hard to pick out, skiffled a little by the breeze so that it dances as if it were still alive. In another shuffling, it disappears among all the others.

A man goes out, carrying a rake. A foolish day for such a job. He should wait until the wind dies down. I would like to rap on the window and draw his attention to the mistake.

I suppose, though, he’s been told to do it. Here, routines, schedules, and orders are important, if not always sensible. I can see it has to be that way.

In any case he doesn’t appear to care. His raking is perfunctory and listless, unseeing. He doesn’t even try to capture all the leaves for his piles beneath the trees, just drags his rake along the surface and doesn’t go back for those uncaught. How can he be satisfied with such a job? He walks away, rake over his shoulder, while behind him the wind
tosses at his work, busily undoing it. He will have to do it all again tomorrow.

If I had his job I would find every leaf and put it in the pile, and I would put them all neatly into some container so they couldn’t blow away. It’s so simple, so apparent. He should be grateful to have a job that requires him to do only a simple apparent task perfectly. He should be happy to do it properly. So many mistakes that man must make.

Although he is not unusual, I see here many things not done right. Sometimes it seems to me that people see only circles: their jobs are done in circles, and corners are always missed.

The woman who vacuums in this room, for instance, never gets right into the corners, and when she washes the windows or the mirrors, she makes only circles on the glass, misses the square edges. There are always smudges in the corners. No wonder there are bits of dust and straight pins in the carpets. Am I the only one who sees? The only one who knows the importance of the unlikely, hidden spots? These people do the same things again and again, and they never do them absolutely.