Life Before Man (16 page)

So if Nate is going to protect Elizabeth and the children from Lesje, Lesje is entitled to protect William from Nate. She feels tender towards William when she considers his need for protection. He’s never needed it before. But now she reflects upon the unconscious nape of his neck, the vulnerability of the hollow at the angle
of his collarbone, his jugular veins, so perilously close to the skin, his inability to tan instead of burn, the wax in his ears unseen by him, his childlike pomposity. She has no desire to hurt William.

Nate puts down his glass, grinds his cigarette into the hotel ashtray. He’s come to the end of ethics. He negotiates the perimeter of the blue bed, walks to Lesje, kneels in front of her where she sits in her Danish Modern chair. He takes her hand away from her mouth, kisses her. She has never been touched with such gentleness. William’s style has a lot of adolescent roughhouse, she now realizes, and the geologist was always in a hurry. Nate isn’t in a hurry. They’ve been here two hours and she still has all her clothes on.

He picks her up, places her on the bed, lies down beside her. He kisses her again, tentatively, lingeringly. Then he asks what time it is. He himself has no watch. Lesje tells him it’s five-thirty. He sits up. Lesje is beginning to feel slightly unattractive. Are her teeth too large, is that it?

“I have to phone home,” he says. “I’m supposed to be taking the kids to dinner at my mother’s.”

He lifts the telephone from the table and dials. The cord trails across Lesje’s chest. “Hello, love,” he says, and Lesje knows it’s Elizabeth. “Just checking in. I’ll pick them up at six, okay?”

The words “home,” “love,” and “mother” have disturbed Lesje. A vacuum forms around her heart, spreads; it’s as if she doesn’t exist. When Nate puts down the phone, she begins to cry. He folds his arms around her, soothing her, smoothing her hair. “There’s lots of time, love,” he says. “Next time will be better.”

Don’t call me that
, she wants to say. She sits on the bed, feet over the side, hands dangling from her wrists, while Nate gets their coats, puts his own on, holds hers out for her. She wants to be the one going to dinner with him. To his mother’s. She doesn’t want to stay here on the blue bed alone, or walk out into the street alone, or go
back to her apartment where she will also be alone whether William is there or not. She wants to pull Nate back onto the bed with her. She doesn’t believe there is lots of time. There is no time, surely she will never see him again. She doesn’t understand why her heart is beating so painfully, gulping for oxygen in the blackness of this outer space. He’s taking something away from her. If he loves her, why has she been exiled?

J
ackass, Nate whispers. Ninny. Fraud. He’s reading the editorial in
The Globe and Mail
, and he usually says such things while doing this, but right now he means himself.
Idiot
.

He sees himself hunched forward on the hotel room chair, raving about his scruples while Lesje sits across the room from him, unattainable, shining like a crescent moon. He doesn’t know why he didn’t want to, couldn’t. He was afraid. He doesn’t want to hurt her, that’s it. But she was hurt anyway. Why did she cry?

His hands are still shaking. Luckily there’s a drink left in his pocket flask. He slides it out from beneath his sweater, gulps quickly, then lights a cigarette to hide the smell. His mother, virtuous woman, does not drink. She doesn’t smoke either, but Nate knows which is lower on her point system of moral crimes. Sometimes she buys beer for him but she draws the line at spirits. Poisoning the system.

The children are out in the tiny kitchen with her, sitting up on the counter, watching her mash the potatoes. She does this by hand; she doesn’t have an electric mixer. She beats eggs by hand, whips
cream by hand. One of his earliest memories of his mother is of her elbow, whirling around like a strange fleshy wind machine. Her television set is black and white and even more primitive than his. She wears aprons, printed ones with bibs.

From the cellar below him the pathos of his childhood rises to engulf him: down there are his baseball glove, the leather cracked, three pairs of outgrown running shoes, his skates, his goalie pads, carefully embalmed in trunks. Though she gives away almost everything else, his mother keeps these objects as if they’re relics, as if he’s already dead. In fairness Nate has to admit that if she hadn’t, he might have kept them himself. The goalie pads, anyway.

He’s read that goalies get ulcers; it figures. He wasn’t heavy enough to play anything else, he didn’t have the weight to check. He remembers the anxiety, everyone expecting him to hurl himself in front of a frozen rubber bullet traveling at the speed of light; the despair when he missed. But he loved it. It was pure: you won or you lost and it was obvious which. When he said this to Elizabeth she thought it was childish. Her own concepts of winning and losing are greyer and more snarled. Is this because she’s female? But his children understand it, so far; Nancy, anyway.

He can see the children over the top of his
Globe and Mail
, their small heads framed by his mother’s red-starred map of world-wide civil-rights violations. Beside it there’s a new poster which reads:
ONE FLASH AND YOU’RE ASH
. His mother has added the abolition of nuclear energy to her long list of crusades. Oddly enough, it’s not a trip she lays on the children. Nor does she tell them to eat up their dinners because of the starving children in Europe, or Asia, or India. (Himself, guiltily stuffing down bread crusts under his mother’s blue benevolent gaze.) She doesn’t ask if they are saving their allowances for the Bandage Campaign. She doesn’t drag them through services at the Unitarian Church, with its noncommittal interior and its idealistic hymns about the Brotherhood of
Man and its icon of a small black boy beside a trash can where most churches have God. The last time they had dinner with his mother, Nate almost choked on his turnips when Nancy began to tell a Newfie joke. But his mother actually laughed. She lets the children tell all kinds of jokes to her: moron jokes, Moby Dick jokes, and many more of dubious taste. “What’s blue and covered with cookies and flies? A dead Girl Guide.”

Nate would have been told it wasn’t nice to make fun of morons or whales or Girl Guides: all were worthy. Much less Newfies. Is it because Nancy and Janet are girls and therefore not expected to reach the level of high seriousness that was and still is expected of him? Or is it merely because his mother is now a grandmother and these are her grandchildren? In any case, she spoils them rotten. She even gives them candy. Although he loves her for it, Nate finds himself resenting it. He can hear his mother laughing now, above the sound of the potato masher. He wishes she’d laughed more with him.

She smiled though. She was raised a Quaker, and Quakers, from what he’d seen of them, were smilers rather than laughers. Nate isn’t sure why she switched to the Unitarians. He’s heard Unitarianism called a featherbed for falling Christians, but his mother doesn’t seem like a woman who has fallen anywhere. (Where is the featherbed for falling Unitarians? he wonders. Such as himself.)

He tries not to discuss theology with his mother. She still believes that goodness will win.

She’s always used the war as an example, virtue triumphant, despite the fact that it killed his father. He can’t remember whether it was before or after this death that she took up part-time nursing at the veterans’ hospital where she still works, the legless and armless men that were young when she started there aging along with her, becoming, she tells him, more and more bitter, fading one by one, dying. She should leave such a depressing job, get something more
cheerful; he’s advised her to do that. But “Everyone else has forgotten them,” she says, looking at him reproachfully. “Why should I?” For some reason her pious sacrifices infuriate him. Why shouldn’t you, you’re human, Nate has wanted to reply. But never has.

His father, no amputee but a simple dead man, smiles down at him now from the mantelpiece, a young face framed by the severe lines of a uniform. Violator of his mother’s pacifist ideals, nevertheless a hero. It had taken Nate a long time to find out exactly how his father had died. “He was a hero,” was all that his mother would say, leaving him with visions of rescues on the beach, his father wiping out enemy machine-gun nests single-handed or floating like a dark bat over some blacked-out town, his parachute billowing like a cape behind him.

Finally, on his sixteenth birthday, he’d asked again and this time – convinced perhaps that he was ready for the facts of life – she’d told him. His father had died in England, of hepatitis, without ever reaching the real war.

“I thought you said he was a hero,” he’d said, disgusted.

His mother’s eyes grew round and bluer. “But Nathanael. He
was
.”

Still and all, he wishes he’d known sooner; he would have felt less overshadowed. It’s hard to compete with any dead man, he knows, much less a hero.

“Dinner, Nate,” his mother calls. She enters carrying the potatoes, the girls follow with knives and forks, and they all crowd around the diminutive oval table at one end of his mother’s living room. Nate has asked earlier if there was anything he could do, but since he got married his mother has banished him to the living room during mealtime preparations. She won’t even let him wash the dishes any more.

They’re the same dishes, beige with orange nasturtiums, he used to wash so endlessly, grudgingly. They depress Elizabeth, which is
one of the reasons she almost never participates in these visits. Elizabeth says his mother’s things invariably look as if she ordered them out of a stamp catalogue, and there’s some truth to this. Everything in his mother’s house is serviceable and, he has to admit, rather ugly. Her table has a plastic finish, her chairs are wipable, her dishes garish, her glassware will bounce on the floor. She doesn’t have the time for frills, she says, or the money either. Another thing that bothers her about the wooden toys he makes is the price. “Only rich people can afford them, Nate,” she says accusingly.

They eat hamburger patties fried in leftover bacon fat, mashed potatoes, and canned beets with margarine, while Nate’s mother asks the children about school and laughs gaily at their terrible jokes. Nate feels his stomach go cold; the canned beets sink, mix uneasily with his furtive Scotch. They are, all three of them, so unsuspecting, so innocent. It’s as if he’s looking at them through a lighted window: inside, peace and tranquil domesticity, this house, the tastes, the smells even, so familiar to him. Good, unassuming. And outside, darkness, thunder, the storm, himself a wolflike monster in tattered clothes, fingernails ragged, lurking red-eyed and envious, snout pressed to the glass. He alone knows the darkness of the human heart, the secrets of evil.
Kaboom
.

“Ninny,” he whispers to himself.

“What did you say, dear?” his mother asks, turning her bright blue eyes full upon him. Older now, with crinkles behind spectacles, but the same eyes, shining, earnest, always on the verge of some emotion he cannot quite face: disappointment, joy. The perpetual spotlight in which he’s always lived, alone on the stage, the star performer.

“I was talking to myself,” he says.

“Oh,” his mother laughs, “I do that all the time. You must have inherited it.”

After dessert, which is canned peaches, the three of them wash the dishes and Nate is again exiled to the living room to do whatever it is that men are supposed to do after dinner. Nate wonders whether, if his father had lived, his mother would have gone in for Women’s Liberation. As it is she doesn’t have to. She does, of course, on the theoretical level, and she’s fond of pointing out the almost innumerable ways in which women’s basic human rights have been cropped, stunted, mutilated and destroyed by men. But if he had slippers she’d bring them for him.

He’ll phone Lesje, see her again. He won’t see her again. He’s a horse’s ass, he’s made a mess of it, she won’t want to see him again. He has to see her again. He’s in love with her, with that cool thin body, the face turned in upon itself in statue-like contemplation. She sits behind a lighted window, draped in soft white, playing the spinet, her moving fingers luminous against the keys. Growling, he leaps through the glass.

E
lizabeth is sitting at the small desk in her bedroom (maple,
c
. 1875). It has a matching chair which she bought at the same auction. It’s a wonder to her how the ladies of that time ever managed to get their great cabbagy padded buttocks onto the chairs made for that purpose. You were supposed to perch gracefully, skirts falling, fake ass billowing around your hidden real ass. No visible support. The apparition of a cloud.

In this desk Elizabeth keeps: her checkbook and canceled checks, her bills, her budget, her lists of things needing to be done around the house (one list for urgent, another for long-term), her personal letters, and the journal she started four years ago but has failed to keep up. This desk has not been opened since Chris’s death.

She can now think:
Chris’s death
. She almost never thinks
Chris’s suicide
. This would imply that Chris’s death was something he did to himself; she thinks of it, on the contrary, as something he did to her. He’s not feeling the effects of it, whereas she still is. For instance, she has not opened the desk until now because in the upper
left-hand pigeonhole, held together tidily by an elastic band, is the bundle of letters he was sending her in September and October; all on lined notebook paper in ballpoint pen, the handwriting becoming larger and more spidery until finally, on October 15, there had been just two words filling an entire page. She should not have kept these letters, she knows; she should throw them out now, immediately, without looking at them again. But she’s always been a saver.

She avoids looking at the letters as she bends over her checkbook. Now that she’s into it, she’s even getting a certain amount of pleasure out of it. Order from chaos, all those unpaid bills cleared out of the way, entered into her book. Nate has paid a few things that had to be paid – the phone bill, the hydro – but everything else has been waiting for her, sometimes with two or three politely outraged letters, requesting and then demanding. She likes to have her accounts settled, to owe nothing to anyone. She likes to know she has money in the bank. She intends always to have enough money for an emergency.