Home Schooling (18 page)

“What is she saying? Let me translate. ‘The well — beloved' — no. Wait. I have it: ‘The beloved, no more befogged, is coming back! Is coming back!' There you go. Goethe. You see, it is the power of language that returns her to me, all these years later.”

Dr. Bergius caught the end of the tape in his hands. “How beautiful the German language is,” he exclaimed. “I forget, and then my mother reminds me.”

The single word that remained in my mind from that evening was
befogged,
and then it changed into another word:
becalmed,
which seemed perfectly to describe the sorry condition of Simon and his boat. I'd left Simon in the cabin, where he'd been drinking all afternoon and evening and had finally passed out. I wanted more than anything just to get home. I had climbed up the gangway from the
wharf to the marina. It was nearly midnight. I had pulled on a sweater, but the night wasn't really cold. Possibly I, too, was a little drunk.

I took a dime out of the pocket of my shorts and used the pay phone in front of the marina, which was closed and dark. After about ten rings, Bethany answered. “Rachel, is that you?” she said. At first, I couldn't convince her I wasn't at home in my bed. “I thought I heard you come home,” she said. “I must have been dreaming.”

“Yes,” I said. “Could you come and get me?” She wanted to know if I was in some kind of trouble, and I told her no, I just needed a ride home right away. “Please hurry,” I said.

“Stay where you are,” she said. “Don't talk to anyone. I'll be there as soon as I can.”

I sat on a curb at the edge of the gravel parking lot. The gentle sloshing of the sea had something in it of Dr. Bergius's mother's voice, which had, on the tape, been accompanied by a faint, insistent, slightly hostile echo, as if the recording had been made in a vast ruined hall. I could picture Dr. Bergius and Eva, the only two people in the audience, their upturned faces shining with pride and apprehension. Distance, absence, loss, all healed by a spirit-voice, a voice from the past, a treat saved up for long, lonely summer evenings, the windows covered, doors left open, white geese swimming on a pond. Was it possible? I wished I could share Dr. Bergius's strange dreams, his vision of a splendid vanished world, but at the time it all seemed troublesome to me, a burden that, once shouldered, couldn't be set aside.

For something to do, I scraped the toe of my running shoe idly back and forth in the gravel. I hugged myself to keep warm, for it was getting cooler as the night advanced. I listened for Bethany's car, but all I heard was the sea lapping at the shore and an occasional odd rustling in the bushes, as if some night animal was scurrying
around. I touched my arms, bruised and sore where Simon had grabbed me roughly. He'd been angry because I wouldn't go out with him in his boat. We were ready to go, nearly ready, but it had seemed to me too dark, and the tide was going out, and besides, I thought Simon had had too much to drink. I swore I'd never speak to him again if he untied the boat from the wharf.

He took hold of me. His eyes were watering with rage or drink or remorse, a need for forgiveness and acceptance — not from me, perhaps, but from his wife, Rosemary. Perhaps I was Rosemary to him, at that moment. Then he seemed to see me as I was. He said he hadn't meant to, he hadn't meant to hurt me. He kissed me on my eyelids, on my mouth. He kissed me tenderly with his whiskey-smelling breath and put his hand under my T-shirt, on my bare skin. He ran his fingers up and down my spine. He held me and rocked me in his arms and I rested my head on his chest like a child.

Then he pushed me away. He went a little crazy, smashing around in the confined space of the cabin, hauling tattered old navigating charts out of a locker, trying to spread them out on the already littered table. Whither shall we sail? he kept saying. His speech was slurred. He was unsteady on his feet. At first he frightened me, then he made me laugh.

“I don't know, Simon,” I said. “I don't know wither we should sail.” There were times when, in spite of everything, I liked him better than anyone I knew. I felt like an adult with Simon. I felt eager to get started on the life I thought I was owed — a life of colour and movement, a life of the heart and mind and spirit, of the wind, the sun. I had another beer, and then another after that. I sat at the table with Simon and we traced out imaginary voyages on the charts, our hands colliding like little lost sailors. If you stay, I'll ravish you, he said. His skin was stretched tight over his cheekbones, his eyes were bright as if with fever, but at a low ebb. Finally, he lapsed into sleep on the nearest bunk. I covered him with a blanket
and left him there. It was the exact midpoint of night, the darkest time. And then I waited in the marina parking lot for Bethany. I waited a long time. I imagined the concentration, the care, with which she was negotiating the narrow twisting road, a swath of trees on either side sparking into life in the incendiary rake of headlights. Or was that a picture that didn't occur to me until later, when I tried my best to reconstruct Bethany's journey? I didn't doubt for a moment that she would find me and take me safely home. But I remembered feeling suddenly unsure; cold, overwhelmed with fatigue, nauseous from the beer I'd drunk. I had the thought that if I possessed the nerve, the simple courage, I could reach up and touch the discordant sky with its random covering of stars and planets. I imagined heaven had, that night, a strange texture of its own: coarse, nubby, repellent.

T
HE BRICK STEPS THAT LED
up to Ben's front porch were slick with frost the morning Marisa moved in. The leafless trees in the garden were dusted with snow. On the street below a cyclist raced past, a couple walked their lanky red-haired dog. Ben's house was in the Queen Anne Hill neighbourhood of Seattle and looked out over Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains. It was an old, gracious house, with lots of space, lots of rooms. Marisa thought it was a sad house, containing traces of a vanished life, a life that had belonged to Ben's former wife, Maureen. Her winter boots, stained with rainwater, were in the back porch, as if she'd just kicked them off. Her coats hung at the back of the downstairs hall closet, bunched together like mourners at a funeral. One day, when she was alone, Marisa slipped into one — red wool, with gold buttons and a little half-belt at the back. She brushed a blond hair — Maureen was blond — off the collar. For the past two years Maureen had been
living in Buenos Aires with her new husband, Luis, but the things she'd left behind, her coats and boots, a gym membership card in a kitchen drawer, her son Logan, made it seem she might walk in at any moment. When Marisa came downstairs in the morning she half-expected to find Maureen in the kitchen, drinking coffee and reading the
Post-Intelligencer;
she'd raise her eyes and give Marisa a bored, incurious glance and think: Ah, the new girlfriend.

Marisa was used to being the new girl. After college she'd taken a number of business courses and for several years had worked for an agency that sent her to fill in when an office was short-staffed or needed reorganizing. She was good at what she did. She liked her peripatetic way of life. When she needed a place to live, she'd sublet an apartment or do a little house sitting. She'd never done this before, though. She'd never moved into a house while it was still occupied. Here was a man and his child. And Logan resented her. He threw his toys at her. For a little kid, his aim was good. “You're stupid, Marisa,” he'd shout. “You're stupid and ugly.”

“Hey, that's not how we talk to Marisa,” Ben would say sternly. He'd order Logan to his bedroom, and Logan would go, but he'd soon be back, unrepentant. He climbed up on the kitchen counter and dunked his feet in a sink full of soapy water. Marisa had been washing a few dishes, because it was Wednesday, Isolde's day off, and the dishwasher was full and she'd forgotten to turn it on. She lifted Logan down and sat him on the kitchen table. She took off his wet slippers and dried his feet on a tea towel.

“I hate you,” he said, kicking at her.

“I know you do,” she said. “I know you do.”

“At the park,” he said, “this dog jumped in the pool and the water catched on fire and burned up.”

“Oh, one of those dogs,” she said. “They think they're so hot, don't they?”

Marisa gave Logan a cookie. That was all she could think to do, feed him apple slices and raisins, as if he were a pet rabbit. He had
tantrums that scared her. He sucked his thumb and ate almost nothing. Could this be right, in a child of four? Ben said Logan was doing just fine; he was a fabulous little guy. He missed his mother, but that was to be expected. Ben said Logan knew Maureen still loved him, even if she wasn't here in person.

“Well, yes, I guess so,” Marisa had said. Ben was the head of the human resources department at a hospital, which was where they'd met. Marisa had worked as his administrative assistant for six months. In the past, she'd avoided office romances, but she and Ben had become very fond of one another.

Now, for the first time in six years, she was taking a break between assignments. This was all very new to her. It was not easy. She was learning as she went along. With Logan, she tried a little subversion. She told him he was the boss. “What you say goes, Bub,” she said.

“You
lady,
” he said.

She put some music on. She and Logan danced around the living room — a long, narrow, beautiful room, with dark wainscoting, built-in cabinets, and frosted pink sconces in gold brackets on either side of the fireplace. From the windows Marisa could see pearly clouds drifting across a pale northwest sky. The Olympic Mountains were dark and jagged, crowned with blue-white ice sheets and glaciers. She'd grown up on the Olympic Peninsula. She and her brother, Norman, still owned the old family house. Her parents were dead. Norman was in Europe. She'd neglected to tell Ben any of this. But, so? Marisa was happy. Being happy was a precarious state, she believed, and required not too much vigilance.

Jennifer Warnes sang about how there was no cure, no cure for love. Logan danced in one spot, his legs jittering, his arms held stiffly out. Marisa wondered if
Famous Blue Raincoat
had belonged to Maureen, another discard. Things fell from Maureen's grasp, it seemed. She ran into the night and was seen no more. Marisa kind of suggested Maureen must have left very quickly and Ben said, no, it wasn't like that. Maureen was organized and practical, although
toward the end things had got a little fraught. There had been the occasional flare-up of temper, the occasional barb. He hadn't been himself. The day before Maureen left, her mother, Kay, had arrived from Spokane to plead with her not to leave her home, abandon her son. More angry words; more tears. Perhaps as a response to the stress, Logan developed a high fever and had to be taken to the hospital. Then Ben caught the virus and was too sick to be concerned that, while his mother-in-law administered baby Aspirin and alcohol baths to his son, he was driving his wife to the airport so that she could go to her lover. How absurd and intractable life was, Ben said. And how desolate, he added with a smile, until he'd met Marisa.

In the fall, Ben and Logan were going to Buenos Aires so that Logan could see his mother. If he could cancel this trip or even postpone it, Ben would. He wished he and Marisa could take a real holiday and be alone for a time. That, he said, would be ideal. Instead, they were going to spend a week at Serenity Cove, a seaside resort and human development centre. A colleague at work had recommended it to Ben and he wanted to check it out as a possible location for a future administrators' retreat. He'd left it a little late, he said, but they'd found room for him, for all three of them. Also, he'd gone ahead and signed himself up for a course, and now he wasn't sure — had he done the right thing or not?

The day before they left for Serenity Cove, Marisa got a letter from her brother, Norman. It had been forwarded to her from her last address. She ran upstairs with it. Folded in with two sheets of paper covered in Norman's calligraphic hand there was a photograph. Norman was in Poland. He was trying to start up an orthotics factory in the Lodz Special Economic Zone, or, as he'd printed in block letters, the
LODZA SPECJALNA STREFA EKONOMICZNA
. He flew regularly to Germany, Switzerland, England in search of investors. He was raising lots of lovely Eurodollars, that futuristic currency in
which everyone and no one believed. A considerable undertaking, but doable, he believed, if approached with the correct ratio of caution to recklessness:
Watch me, no hands!

Through the open bedroom window she could hear Ben talking to Logan. Ben had mown the lawn and the smell of freshly-cut grass filled Marisa with a sense of elation and joy. This was her life. This was who she was now.

Norman wrote that he loved Lodz, the California of Poland. The Beijing of Eastern Europe! Incidentally, he added, he'd just got engaged to a woman called Teresa. She was a librarian at the
Bibliotecki Publiczne
in Poland. She was beautiful. He hardly deserved such luck. She had a son, Pawel, aged five. See enclosed photo, Norman wrote.

Marisa picked up the photograph just as Logan ran up the stairs and banged at the bedroom door. “Open the door,” he yelled. He wanted a drink. He wanted orange juice. “Hurry, Marisa,” he said.

She put the letter and the photograph back in the envelope and slid it under some clothes in her suitcase, which was open on the bed beside her. Then she let Logan into the room.

“What's this?” he demanded, going over to the suitcase.

“You know,” she said. “It's a suitcase. I'm getting packed. Then we'll get you packed.”

“I'm not going,” he said.

“You can't stay by yourself.”

“Isolde's staying,” he said.

“Isolde is going on holiday, too,” Marisa said. “She's going to visit her family in Trinidad.” Every morning, except on Wednesdays, Isolde rode her bike up the hill to Ben's house. She made breakfast and took Logan to and from preschool and read Bible stories to him while he ate his lunch. Isolde's husband was a deacon at the Episcopalian church a few blocks away. Isolde was lovely. When she was in the house, everything ran smoothly and Logan was happy.