Life Before Man (20 page)

She could not move; nevertheless she had Nate take her to the train in a taxi, where she sat like a slab of rock all the way to Thunder Bay and then on the unspeakable bus. English River. Upsala on one side, Bonheur on the other, Osaquan up the road. He used to point out those names, and the irony, the indignity of having been born and forced to live in English River. “The English,” they still said, Scots, French, Indians, what-have-you. The enemy, the despoilers. She was one of the English.

She sat in the back pew, kneeling when the others kneeled, standing when they stood, while Chris, surrounded by meager flowers, underwent the ceremony. Luckily it was in English, she could follow it. They even said the Lord’s Prayer, a slightly different version. Forgive us our trespasses. When she was young she used to think that meant walking on other people’s property. A thing she never did; therefore she did not need to be forgiven. As we forgive those who trespass against us. Get off the lawn, Auntie Muriel used to shout at the running children, opening the front door, then closing
it like a mouth behind her voice. The old priest turned towards the people, raising the cup, mumbling, distaste on his face. The Latin was better, you could tell he thought that.

They didn’t bury him at a crossroads with a stake, though. Death by misadventure. The shoulders were bowed, the heads bent, his mother in black in the front pew, with a real veil. The other children – Elizabeth supposed that was who they were – lined up beside her.

Afterwards there was coffee at the house. The neighbors brought cookies. One of those small northern bungalows, on a rock, pink and blue like a cake, dark spruce trees all around. Skidoo parked in the shed, the Eaton’s Catalogue furniture, the worn store drapes four inches too short. Everything was the way she’d known it would be. The father’s carefully learned English, the mother’s dark face, baggy with grief and starch. We wanted him to have a chance. He was doing good. Always a smart boy. An education, finished his Grade Twelve, a steady job. Elizabeth thinking: Bullshit. You drove him out. Hit him when he wouldn’t turn into you; right in that shed. We told each other a lot.

The mother: You a friend of his? From the city, eh? Then, as she’d feared, throwing back the veil, the bad teeth showing, pushing her dark face towards Elizabeth, her hair turning to snakes:
You killed him
.

But she could never have made it as far as the train, the taxi even. Chris disappeared without her help or connivance. As far as she knows, his parents, if they still exist, have never heard of her. And her images are all wrong, too. He let on to her at first, hinted, that he was part Indian and part French, Métis, that mythical hybrid; archaic, indigenous, authentic as she was not, his sense of grievance fully earned. He sneered at her, the whiteness of her skin and presumably her blood, made love as if exacting payment, and she’d let herself be bullied. As she would otherwise have not. Then
one afternoon, lying depleted on his smoky bed, they’d gone past that into the land of perilous confidences, her scrounging childhood, hunger and unbrushed hair behind her mother’s helpless pretensions. Never envy anyone, she’d said, until you know. Now tell me.

It was twilight, drawn curtains, he rubbed his hand over and over her bare shoulder, for the first time he would give her something, give something away, he could hardly do it. It made her wince, that effort, it was not what she wanted. Don’t ever drop your defenses, she should have told him; they’re there to defend you.

He was only a quarter French, and no Indian at all. The rest was Finnish and English; his mother’s name was Robertson. They weren’t even poor enough to be romantic, they ran the cigar store, the good one, not the other. No trapper he. The beatings were real enough, but less frequent than he’d said. Was that when her attention had begun to slip, was she that cruel, that snobbish? Probably.

Despite this, she has not known what to answer to that mother’s face looming like a moon, a moon seen close, cold and ravaged. No, she’s said, more than once. It was malice, pride, it was his own damn fault. It wasn’t me.

Now she finally wonders. What if? What if she’d left him alone. Foregone that jag, energy flowing into her. I wonder if you have some leftover fur scraps; my daughters make doll clothes out of them. To Chris, who had nothing left over, no reserves he could draw on, no free gifts to hand out. She’d known what she was doing. To be loved, to be hated also, to be the center. She had what he wanted, power over a certain part of the world: she knew how to behave, what fork to use, what went with what. He wanted that power. He had two ties, one green, one purple. Neither of them would do. He looked better in a T-shirt, she told him; which she should not have done.

She had that power and she’d let him see it and touch it. She let him see he was deficient and she promised, what? A transformation, a touch on the shoulder, knighthood. Then she’d stepped back, showing him that he was after all only a vacation, a beautiful picture on a brochure, a man in a loincloth whacking the head off some nondescript coconut. A dime a dozen. Leaving him naked.

She thinks: I treated him the way men treat women. A lot of men, a lot of women; but never me, not on your goddamned life. He couldn’t take it. Does she feel pity for him at last, or is it contempt?

Downstairs Nate rattles the silverware, rinsing it, she knows, before putting it into the plastic basket in the dishwasher. She’s heard this sound often enough. She turns her eyes away from the stars, looks instead down through the floor. Nate shuffles, cigarette stub in his mouth, lost in some melancholy dream. Mooning, yearning. She watched him this evening, through the dinner which she did not in the least enjoy, the parlor games, she could see it all, he’s in love with that giraffe. Coffee on the rug, a minor irritation, she’ll have to get it steam-cleaned; also a satisfaction. Lesje is a clown. But is, despite her gawkiness and lack of poise, a younger woman, quite a lot younger than Elizabeth. Elizabeth finds this banal. Tedious, predictable. However, Nate has been what everyone would call
in love
before. She’ll give him permission, express interest, be helpful, wait it out. She’s been through this before, she can do it with one hand tied behind her back.

(But why bother, another voice says. Why not let him go? Why make the effort?)

There’s something else, she remembers now, and it’s dangerous. Before, he wanted to be protected. He wanted a woman to be a door he could go through and shut behind him. Everything was fine as long as she was willing to pretend she was a cage, Nate a mouse,
her heart pure cheese. He is, she knows, a hopeless sentimentalist. Earthmother, Nate her mole, snouting in darkness while she rocked him. I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree. When she gave it up he found Martha, who could not do it nearly as well.

But this time he wants to protect. Looking down at the top of his head, the back of his neck, the way his hands move, deliberately, she knows it, even though he may not know it himself.

Elizabeth sits up in bed. Wires light in her legs and fingers, the walls with their shadows are in place again, the floor is there, the ceiling has healed over. Space is a cube around her, she is the center. There is something to be defended.

Stay in your place, Nate. I will not tolerate that void.

S
adly, Nate stacks plates. It’s the rule that when Elizabeth cooks, Nate does the dishes. One of the many rules, subrules, codicils, addenda, errata. Living with Elizabeth involves a maze of such legalities, no easier to understand because some of them are unspoken. Like an unwary pedestrian, he only realizes he’s violated one of these when the bumper hits him, the whistle blows, the big hand descends. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. He imagines Lesje to be without rules.

He sees himself bending to whisper at the bathroom keyhole:
I love you
. Irrevocable commitment, even though he isn’t sure whether Lesje, barricaded behind the bathroom door where she’d been for the past half-hour, could really hear him. He isn’t sure why she was upset. He’d seen her face as she headed out the door. The coffee stain spreading on the rug behind her; but it wasn’t that.

He’d wanted to reach through the bathroom door, comfort her, he thought about knocking, decided against it. What if she opened the door? If he said that to her face, no wall between, he would have to take action. Even though he meant it. He would find himself in
mid-air, hurtled into a future he could not yet imagine, Elizabeth left on the solid earth behind him, feet on the ground where she always claimed they were, a dark hummock, the children’s faces two pale ovals beside her. Receding from him.

He thinks of them (riotously bouncing at this moment on their friend Sarah’s spare bed, in the dark, stifling laughter) and sees, not their daily faces, but two little portraits. In silver frames, birthday-party dresses, the dead hues of a black and white photo tinted. He and Elizabeth do not own any such portraits. His children immobilized, stilled. Bronzed. He tries to remember what it was like before they were born, finds he can’t. He can only go as far back as Elizabeth, trundling through the days and finally climbing ponderously from the car which he’d bought months before for this occasion, doubling over against the hood; himself solicitous and frightened. They wouldn’t let fathers into the delivery room in those days. He walked her to the desk; the nurse looked at him disapprovingly. See what you’ve done. He installed her in a ward room, sat as she clenched and unclenched, watched as she vanished down the corridor in a wheelchair. It was a long labor. He slouched in a chair covered with green vinyl, reading back copies of
Sports Illustrated
and
Parents
, feeling his mouth fog up. He wanted a drink badly and all they had was coffee from a machine. Behind doors an earthquake was taking place, a flood, a tornado that could rip his life apart in minutes, and he was shut out from it.

Around him machines wheezed; he dozed. He was supposed to feel anxious and happy, he knew. Instead he found himself wondering: What if they both die? The bereaved young father stood at the graveside, clogged with grief, as the woman once so vibrant and sensuous, who’d smelled of crushed ferns, descended forever into the earth, cradling a stillborn baby the color of suet. He walked down a road, any road, thumbing, heading for some legendary steamer, pack on his back. A broken man.

When he’d finally been allowed in, the event was over. There was a baby where no baby had been. Elizabeth, depleted, was lying propped up in a white hospital gown, a plastic name on her wrist. She looked at him dully, as if he were a salesman or a census-taker.

“Is it all right?” he said, noticing immediately that he’d said “it” rather than “you” or “she.” He hadn’t even said, “Was it all right.” It must have been; she was here, in front of him, she wasn’t dead. They all overestimated it.

“They didn’t give me the needle in time,” Elizabeth said.

He looked down at the baby, wrapped like a sausage roll, held by one of Elizabeth’s arms. He felt relieved and grateful, and cheated. She told him several times afterwards that he had no idea of what it was like, and she was right, he hadn’t. But she acted also as if this was his fault.

He thinks they were closer before the birth of Janet, but he can’t remember. He can’t remember what
close
means, or rather what it would have meant once with Elizabeth. She used to make omelettes for him at night after he was finished studying and they would eat them together, sitting in the double bed. He remembers that time as good. Love food, she called it.

Nate scrapes leftover
boeuf bourguignon
into a bowl; later he will put it down the Garb-all. His lapses of memory are beginning to bother him. It’s not only Elizabeth, the way (he deduces) she must have been, that’s slipping away from him. He loved her, he wanted to marry her, they got married, and he can recall only fragments. Almost a year of law school is gone now; his adolescence is hazy. Martha, once so firm and tangible, is transparent, her face wobbles; soon she will dissolve completely.

And the children. What did they look like, when did they walk, what did they say, how did he feel? He knows events have taken place, important events of which he is now ignorant. What
will happen to this day, to Elizabeth’s disastrous dinner party, the remains of which are now being ground to shreds by the metal teeth under the sink?

Nate starts the dishwasher, wipes his hands on his pantlegs. He goes to the stairs, quietly before remembering: the children are away for the night. Lesje too is gone, fleeing almost directly from the bathroom, stopping only to snatch her coat, her young man in tow. The bun-faced young man whose name Nate can’t at the moment recall.

Instead of going to his own cubicle, his cell, he pauses at the children’s door, then walks into their room. He knows now that he will leave; it feels, instead, as though they have left him. Here are the dolls, the scattered paint sets, the scissors, the odd socks and rabbit-faced slippers they’ve forgotten in their haste to pack. Already they are on a train, a plane, headed for some unknown destination, being carried away from him at the speed of light.

He knows they will be back tomorrow morning in time for Sunday brunch, that tomorrow anyway everything will go on the same, that he will stand at the kitchen table dishing out scrambled eggs on toast for himself and the girls and for Elizabeth, who will be wrapped in her blue terry-cloth bathrobe, hair only half-brushed. He will dish out the scrambled eggs and Elizabeth will ask him to pour her a second cup of coffee, and it will seem even to him as though nothing is about to happen.

Yet he kneels; tears come to his eyes. He should have held on, he should have held on more tightly. He picks up one of Nancy’s blue rabbit slippers, stroking the fur. It’s his own eventual death he cradles. His lost, his kidnapped children, gone from him, kept hostage. Who has done this? How has he allowed it to happen?