Life Before Man (10 page)

The three of them are looking through glass at the effigy of the paleontologist, kneeling in his cubicle among simulated rocks. He has a hat on and he’s chalky white, with clean-cut First World War air-ace features and well-trimmed hair. Silent Sam, they’ve nick-named him. Quite unlike Professor Morgan, whiskered and unkempt leader of the only dig Lesje has been privileged to attend, as flunky and chief varnisher. He kept his pipe tobacco in his right pocket and emptied the old pipes into his left one. Several times he caught fire and they had to put him out.
Balderdash. Man doesn’t know
what he’s talking about
. He thought Lesje was one of the biggest jokes he’d heard.
So you want to be a paleontologist. Better off learning to cook. Worst coffee I ever tasted
. Lesje cringing – because she respected his opinion, had read every one of his papers she could get her hands on, and his book on carnivorous dinosaurs of the Canadian plains – appeasing him with more and better cups of coffee, or tea, or Scotch, running her ass off like some dumb airline stewardess, trying to find ways to please him, until she discovered there weren’t any. Luckily her current boss, Dr. Van Vleet, isn’t anything like that, though he must be even older. On the other hand Lesje can’t imagine him digging anything up. He specializes in the classification of teeth.

But the man in the glass case is a model. He’s holding a fossil; presumably he’s undergoing the ecstasy of scientific discovery, but his face isn’t giving any of that away.

“What’s he doing?” Nancy wants to know. Lesje suspects she doesn’t really want to know, but it’s part of this charade that the children must ask polite questions and Lesje must turn herself inside out trying to answer them.

“He’s plaster-coating a bone,” Lesje says. “He has to do it very carefully because it isn’t real bone, it’s a fossil. The softer parts of the bone decayed away and the shape of the bone has been filled up with minerals, so it’s kind of like stone. It’s very brittle.”

“I know,” Janet says. “Daddy told us.”

“Is that your job?” Nancy says.

“Well, part of it,” Lesje says.

“That’s a funny job,” Nancy says.

“Well, I do other things too,” Lesje says, wondering why she’s defending herself to a nine-year-old. Or is she eight? “Actually I’ve never done that much actual digging. I did a lot of bone preservation. Some of the fossils have to be preserved right away or they’ll fall apart. We coat them with Gelva. That’s a kind of resin.”

The children stare through the glass at the rigid paleontologist, who the more you look resembles a corpse, Lesje thinks, with his pallor and fixed eyes. Janet’s face is clamped as though she’s caught an off smell, Nancy is curious but uninvolved. How can Lesje explain to them why she does this, why she loves doing this? The day they found the Albertosaurus, a thigh, a vertebra. Morgan: “What have we here?” Disappointed because it was a well-known species. But Lesje:
Live again!
she’d wanted to cry, like some Old Testament prophet, like God, throwing up her arms, willing thunderbolts; and the strange flesh would grow again, cover the bones, the badlands would moisten and flower.

But that can’t happen, so the next best thing is these displays, with the admittedly plastic vegetation among which the bones, articulated and rearticulated after furious argument over which way the creatures had actually walked, rear their gigantic heads and cavernous eye-sockets far above the craning necks of those who are, by the grace of their ancestors, still living.

In the Cretaceous twilight the children press buttons, watching the colored slides flip through their cycles while the Museum’s automated voices drone. Lesje knows she’s superfluous. Nate strolls up beside her, lounging, unconscious, and she wants to shake him. What is all this about, why has he put her through it? Made her sacrifice her free time (she could have been shopping! reading! copulating!) for this lack of an event? Is she being inspected, is it a test, has she failed? If he wants to make a pass at her – and she doesn’t know what she would do if he did that, hasn’t thought beyond that first pressure of his hand on some part of her body forbidden enough to be decisive – why doesn’t he make it? (Not here and now, of course; not in front of the children. Who probably would not notice.)

But that doesn’t seem to be the point.

T
he three of them, ahead of him, indistinct in the cavernous dark. Monsters loom over them, reptilian, skeletal, wired into poses of menace as in some gargantuan tunnel of horrors. Nate feels his bones eroding, stone filling the cavities. Trapped. Run Nancy, run Janet, or time will overtake you, you too will be caught and frozen. But Nancy, secure in the belief that he can’t see her, is calmly picking her nose.

Lesje’s silhouette bends towards the children. Elongated: Our Lady of the Bones. “ ‘Extinct’ means there aren’t any more of them,” she says. Nate hopes she won’t find his children ignorant or stupid. He’s sure he’s explained to them several times what “extinct” means. And they’ve visited this gallery often, though Nancy prefers the Egyptian mummies and Janet likes the armor, the lords and ladies. Are they playing up to Lesje to help him out, asking questions to counterfeit interest, are they already that perceptive, that sly? Is he that obvious?

“Why not?” Janet says. “Why are they all extinct?”

“No one really knows,” Lesje says. “The world changed, and the new conditions weren’t suitable for them.” She pauses. “We’ve found quite a few eggs with baby dinosaurs in them. Towards the end, they didn’t even hatch.”

“It got too cold, you turkey,” Nancy says to Janet. “It was the Ice Age.”

“Well, not exactly,” Lesje begins, but thinks better of it.

She turns back towards him, hesitating, waiting.

Nancy runs, tugs at his arm to make him bend down. She wants to see the mummies now, she whispers. Janet, his squeamish one, will protest, there will be a compromise, time will flow on; soon everyone will be one day older.

How could he desert them? Could he endure those prearranged Saturday outings? To see them only once a week, for that would be the price, the pound of flesh. How’ve you been, kids. Great, Dad. Stilted. No bedtime stories, impromptu chases along the hallway, voices at the cellar door. Unfair. But it will be that or some other unfairness, Lesje, as yet untouched, intact, weeping in a bedroom doorway somewhere in the future. Bright paint flaking from her, pieces of thin curved glass, a broken ornament. As for him, slivers in his murderous hands, sitting in the bar at the Selby Hotel, pondering the ethical life. Would he be any better off than he is now? He would watch hockey games with the other drinkers, echoing their raucous cheers. The ethical life. He’d been taught it was the only desirable goal. Now that he no longer believes it’s possible, why does he keep on trying to lead it?

Limping home from school, purple and cut because his mother had forbidden him to fight.
Even when they hit me first?
Even when they hit you first. But he’d thought of a way around her.
They were beating up a smaller boy
. Not good enough.
Three against one
. Still not good enough.
They called him a kike
. Ah, that did it. Fire flashed from
her eyes. In the name of tolerance, kill. My beamish boy. Nate, hypocrite at six and two inches taller than any of his tormentors, fought with fierce joy, inventing new injustices to account for his triumphant black eyes. Deeds Not Creeds, as the Unitarians said.

He can rehearse all the reasons for not acting, in this or any other situation; yet he knows his own past well enough to fear that nevertheless he will unaccountably act. Despite his scruples, and more desperately, more senselessly because of them. Because of his selfishness, as someone will be sure to point out. Not Elizabeth though. She claims she doesn’t care what he does, who his ladyfriends are, as she puts it, as long as the children are protected. As she also puts it. She means her children. Nate is sure she’s secretly convinced she conceived them through parthenogenesis, having conveniently forgotten the night of the bath towel and the other night, the many other nights. Laziness and habit. As for him, he’d like to think his children had sprung fully formed from his forehead. Then they would be entirely his.

As it is, Nate knows who would get the children. Though they’ve never discussed separating. Even during the worst times, she’s never told him to leave, he’s never threatened it. But it hangs between them in every conversation; it’s the secret weapon, the final solution, the one unspeakable thing. He suspects they both think about it almost all the time: considering, rejecting.

Better to stop now. Instead of sweeping Lesje up from the carpeted floor of the Vertebrate Evolution Gallery and running up the stairs with her to the seclusion of Mammals and Insects, he’ll thank her and shake her hand, touching her anyway that once, the long thin fingers cool in his palm. Then he’ll visit the mummies and after that the suits of armor, and he’ll try to avoid seeing any of these artifacts as images of himself. Outside, he’ll comfort himself with popcorn and a cigarette, substitutes for the double Scotch he will
by that time really need. They will wait on the stone steps of the Museum, a family, leaning against the plaque at the right-hand side of the door,
THE ARTS OF MAN THROUGH ALL THE YEARS
, until Elizabeth materializes from whatever limbo she’s wandered off to, her stocky figure in the black coat proceeding evenly up the steps to claim them at the appointed time.

E
lizabeth lies propped in the bathtub. Once she took baths for pleasure; now she takes them for the same reason she eats. She’s servicing her body, like servicing a car, keeping it well cleaned, its moving parts in trim, ready for the time when she may be able to use it again, inhabit it. For pleasure. She’s eating too much, she knows that, but better too much than too little. Too little is the danger. She’s lost the capacity to judge, since she’s never really hungry. No doubt she’s taking too many baths as well.

She’s careful to have the water at less than body heat, as she has a fear of falling asleep in the tub. You can drown in two inches of water. They say if the water is the same temperature as your blood your heart might stop, but only if there’s something wrong with it. As far as she knows there is nothing wrong with her heart.

She’s brought work home from the office. She’s bringing work home a lot, since she seems unable to concentrate on it there. She can’t concentrate on it at home either, but at least there’s no one who might walk in on her and find her staring at the wall. She’s always
done most of her own typing; she’s a crack typist, why not, she did nothing but that for years, but also she doesn’t like to delegate her work. She made her way up to her present position by having a good telephone manner and by always knowing the details of the job above her a little better than the person actually doing it, so she has a natural distrust of secretaries. Now, however, the paper is piling up. She’ll have to seize hold soon.

She frowns, trying to focus on the book in front of her, held up in one dry hand.

Elizabeth closes her eyes. It’s a catalogue, a traveling show. Peasant paintings. It’s in England right now and they can have it in a couple of years, if they want it. She’s supposed to be looking at the catalogue and giving feedback. She’s supposed to write a memo saying whether she thinks the show would be worthwhile and interesting to the Canadian public.

But she can’t, she can’t care. She can’t care about the Canadian public, much less about this catalogue written by some armchair Marxist in England. From his point of view she’s a landlord. She wonders about her tenants, with their sallow faces and their abnormally quiet child, dressed always a little too neatly, a little too well. They’re foreigners of some kind, but Elizabeth doesn’t know what and it would be rude to ask. Something from Eastern Europe, she thinks, escaped. They are unobtrusive and they pay their rent,
nervously, always a day ahead. Are they fighting a long war to oust her? There are no signs of it. These paintings are from a place so utterly alien to her that it might as well be on the moon.

She skips the introduction, turns to the pictures.
New Village, New Spirit. Continue to Advance. The New Look of Our Piggery
. It’s blatant propaganda, and the pictures are ugly. With their crude bright colors and clearly drawn smiling figures they’re like the Sunday-school handouts she loathed so much as a child.
Jesus loves me
. She never believed that for a second. Jesus was God and God loved Auntie Muriel; Auntie Muriel was absolutely certain of that. As far as Elizabeth was concerned God could not love both her and Auntie Muriel at the same time.

They never went to church before they moved to Auntie Muriel’s. Which Auntie Muriel might have known. Elizabeth won a prize for memorizing scripture verses. Caroline, on the other hand, made a spectacle of herself. It was Easter; they had on their new blue hats, with the elastic that cut into Elizabeth’s chin, and the matching coats. Size ten and size seven but identical: Auntie Muriel loved dressing them like twins. The pulpit was banked with daffodils but the minister was not talking about the Resurrection. He preferred Judgment.
And the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood, and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, and the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together
.

Elizabeth pleated and unpleated her picture of Christ coming out of the hole in the rock, his face translucent, two blue women kneeling before him. She folded his head back, then pulled the top of the paper, making him pop up again like a jack-in-the-box. The church smelled of perfume, too strong, waves of dusting powder from Auntie Muriel beige and upright beside her. She wanted to take off her coat.
Look, look
, said Caroline, standing up. She was pointing at the stained glass window, the center one where Christ in purple knocked at a door. She crouched, then tried to scramble across the
pew in front, dislodging Mrs. Symon’s mink hat. Elizabeth sat still, but Auntie Muriel reached across and jerked at the back of Caroline’s coat. The minister frowned from his grape-draped pulpit and Caroline began to scream. Auntie Muriel took hold of her arm, but she broke free and pushed past the line of knees and ran down the aisle. They should have known, right then and there. Something wrong. She said afterwards that the purple was falling on her, but Auntie Muriel told everyone she’d just had an upset stomach. Excitable, they said; little girls often were. She should never have been brought to the main service.