Life Before Man (24 page)

Lesje’s mother is pleased she’s suddenly come to dinner; Lesje hasn’t come to dinner that often lately. But she’s also puzzled: she throws swift inquiring glances across the table at Lesje while Lesje wolfs her Yorkshire pudding, hoping for explanations, later, in the kitchen. But Lesje can’t explain anything. Since she’s never told her parents in so many words that she was living with William (though her mother guessed), she can hardly say she’s moved out and is now living with someone else. Marriage is an event, a fact, it can be discussed at the dinner table. So is divorce. They create a framework, a beginning, an ending. Without them everything is amorphous, an endless middle ground, stretching like a prairie on either side of each day. Though she’s moved herself physically from one place to another Lesje has no clear sense of anything having ended or of anything else having begun.

She told her mother she’d moved. She also said she hadn’t unpacked her own dishes, which is true and was her excuse for inviting herself so suddenly to dinner. But she gave the impression that the move had taken place that very day, whereas in fact it’s been three weeks since she hired the U-Haul and bundled her possessions into cardboard boxes. She did it during the day, when William wasn’t there, and with no prior announcement. To say she was moving would have demanded an explanation, and she was reluctant to get into that.

It’s amazing how quickly her life with William was expelled from the drawers and torn from the walls and how little space it took up. She carried the boxes to the elevator herself, nothing was very heavy, and packed them into the U-Haul, which wasn’t necessary at all, a station wagon would have done. Then she lifted them out and carted them up the rickety steps of the house she’d rented. It’s a decaying row house on Beverly Street, not a very good one, but she’d only spent a day looking and she’d taken the first space available that was both cheap enough and big enough for Nate’s machines. A developer owned it; he was going to turn it into a townhouse, so he was willing to give her a low rate as long as she didn’t demand a lease.

She felt she had to get out before William apologized. If he’d apologized – as she’d been sure he would sooner or later – she would have been trapped.

The day after that thing happened – she doesn’t know what to call it and has finally decided to think of it as
the incident –
William left early in the morning. Lesje had spent the night in the bathroom with the door locked, lying curled up on the bathmat covered with towels, but this had been overkill as he hadn’t tried to get in.

It had pleased her slightly to think of him arriving at work unshowered, unshaven; squeaky cleanliness was one of his fetishes. When she heard the apartment door close she ventured out, changed into fresh clothes and went to work herself. She didn’t know what to do or think. Was he violent, would he try it again? She resisted the desire to phone Nate and describe
the incident
. After all it wasn’t that bad, she hadn’t been hurt, she hadn’t really been raped, not technically. Also, if she told Nate she would be putting pressure on him to do something; to move in with her immediately, for instance. She didn’t want to do this. She wanted Nate to move in when he was ready, when he wanted to be with her, not because of something William had almost done.

After work she wandered around for a while, sitting in Murray’s with a cup of coffee and a cigarette, walking along Bloor Street and looking at the store windows. In the end she went home, and William was sitting in the living room, pink-cheeked, cheerful, as if nothing at all had happened. He greeted her pleasantly and launched into a discussion of the caloric values produced by the controlled fermentation of liquid effluents.

This behavior of William’s was more frightening than surliness or rage would have been. Had William forgotten all about the incident? Where had it come from, that burst of pure hate? She couldn’t ask him, for fear of provoking it again. She stayed up late, reading a book on ichthyosaurs until after William had gone to bed. Then she slept on the living-room rug.

“More mashed potatoes, Lesje?” her mother says. Lesje nods. She’s eating ravenously. This is the first real meal she’s had in three weeks. She’s been camping out in the almost empty house, sleeping on blankets unrolled on the bedroom floor, eating take-out food, bran muffins, hamburgers, fried chicken. She puts the bones and crusts in a green garbage bag; she has no garbage can yet. She has no stove and no fridge either and she hasn’t got around to buying them, partly because she left a month’s rent in an envelope for William, which has lowered her bank balance. But also she feels that major domestic appliances like these, even second-hand ones, should be shared by Nate. A stove is a serious commitment.

Lesje eats apple pie and wonders what Nate is doing. When her father says, “How’s the bone business?” she smiles wanly at him. If you discovered a new kind of dinosaur, you could name it after yourself.
Aliceosaurus
, she used to write, practicing, Anglicizing her name. When she was fourteen this was her ambition, to discover a new kind of dinosaur and name it
Aliceosaurus
. She made the mistake of telling
her father this; he thought it was very funny and teased her about it for months afterwards. She isn’t sure what her ambition is now.

Lesje helps her mother stack the dishes and carry them out to the kitchen. “Is everything all right, Lesje?” her mother says, once they’re out of her father’s earshot. “You’re looking thin.”

“Yes,” Lesje says. “I’m tired from moving, that’s all.”

Her mother seems satisfied with this. But everything is not all right. Nate comes to her new house in the evenings and they make love on her unrolled blankets, the hard boards jammed against her back. That’s fine, but he hasn’t yet said when he’ll move in. She’s beginning to wonder whether he ever will. Why should he? Why should he disarrange his life? He says he has to explain it gradually to the children; otherwise they might become disturbed. Lesje feels that she herself is disturbed already, but she can’t tell this to Nate.

She doesn’t seem able to tell it to anyone else either. Certainly not Trish or Marianne. She sits with them in the Museum coffee shop, smoking, tensed, always on the verge of blurting. But she can’t. She’s aware that from the outside William’s behavior, the incident (which could be seen as an ignominious failure), her own flight and unconditional arrangement with Nate, might look naïve, gawky, laughable perhaps.
Gauche
, Marianne would think, though she wouldn’t say it; or, a new English expression she’s taken to lately:
thick
. She would give Lesje good counsel, as if she were planning a wardrobe for her. She’d advise bargaining, pressure, ruses, all things Lesje is not good at. You want him to live with you? Try locking him out. Why get a cow when milk’s free? Lesje doesn’t want to be the object of such amused, momentary concern. It occurs to her that she has no close friends.

She wonders whether she could talk to her mother, confide in her. She doubts it. Her mother has cultivated serenity; she’s had to. Juliet at fifty-five, Lesje thinks, though her mother was never Juliet;
she’d been no spring chicken, as the aunts said. No balconies for her father, no elopements; they’d taken the streetcar to the City Hall. Lesje studied
Romeo and Juliet
in high school; the teacher thought it would appeal to them because it was about teenagers and they were supposed to be teenagers. Lesje hadn’t felt like a teenager. She wanted to study alluvial plains and marl deposits and vertebrate anatomy, and hadn’t paid much attention to the play except to fill its margins with drawings of giant ferns. But how would the Montagues and the Capulets have behaved if Romeo and Juliet had lived? A lot like her relatives, she suspects. Snubs at family gatherings, resentments, subjects that were not discussed, this or that grandmother weeping or raving in a corner. Juliet, like her mother, would have become impenetrable, compact, plump, would have drawn herself together into a sphere.

Lesje’s mother wants Lesje to be happy, and if Lesje isn’t happy she wants her to appear to be happy. Lesje’s happiness is her mother’s justification. Lesje has known this forever and is well practiced at appearing, if not happy, at least stolidly content. Busy, gainfully employed. But standing beside her mother, drying the dishes on the ageless dishtowel that says
GLASS
in blue down one side, she doesn’t feel she has the strength to keep up this particular appearance. She wants instead to cry, and she wants her mother to put her arms around her and console her.

It’s for William she wants to be consoled. The loss of William, familiar William, does hurt after all. Not because of William himself, but because she trusted him simply, uncaring, unthinking. She trusted him like a sidewalk, she trusted him to be what he seemed to be, and she will never be able to do that with anyone again. It isn’t the violence but the betrayal of this innocent surface that is so painful; though possibly there was no innocence, possibly she made it up.

But her mother, encased as she is, would never be able to mourn with Lesje. She’d merely wait until Lesje had stopped crying and wiped her eyes on the dishtowel, and then she would point out all the things Lesje has pointed out to herself already:
No real harm done. You’re better out of it. It was the only way. Everything turns out for the best
.

Her grandmothers would not have done this. They would have mourned with her, both of them; they had the talent for it. They would have wept, keened, wailed. They would have put their arms around her and rocked her, stroking her hair, crying extravagantly, ridiculously, as if she’d been damaged beyond repair. Perhaps she is.

I
n the cellar Nate, leaning against his workbench, fingers the handles of the brushes soaking in their coffee tin of Varsol. He’s always meant to put in better lighting down here. Now there would be no point. In the dim yellowish light he feels like some huge insect, white and semi-sighted, groping its way by a touch that is also smell. Paint fumes and damp cement, his familiar atmosphere. He twists the screw on the small red vise, tightening it on a glued and drying sheep’s head, part of a Mary Had a Little Lamb pull toy. He had no difficulty designing the sheep, but the Mary is causing trouble. He can never do faces. A sunbonnet, he thinks.

He’s supposed to be packing. He meant to pack, he’s been meaning to pack. He has pedaled a stack of cardboard boxes home from the supermarket and bought a roll of strong twine. He’s collected newspapers for wrapping; they’ve been in a neat pile at the foot of the cellar stairs for two weeks. He’s even taken some sandpaper and a box of mixed nails and screws to Lesje’s and left it in the front room as a pledge of his good intentions. He’s explained to her that he wants to proceed gradually. First he’ll tell Elizabeth
he’s decided to move his workshop to a larger, brighter space. She’ll be surprised he can afford it, but he can get through that. Then he’ll tell the children the same thing. After they’re no longer used to having him around all the time he will, by slow degrees, stop sleeping at one house and start sleeping at the other. He wants to make the actual break imperceptible to them, he’s said.

He fully intends to implement this plan, but with a crucial difference he doesn’t think he needs to discuss with Lesje: he wants to wait until Elizabeth asks him or even orders him to leave. It will save a lot of trouble later if he can give her the impression she’s making the decision herself. He isn’t yet sure how he is going to arrange this.

Meanwhile he has to cope with Lesje’s obvious and growing depression. She hasn’t been putting any pressure on him, any spoken pressure. Nevertheless he can scarcely breathe. For three weeks now he’s been running up the cellar stairs when he hears the children come home from school so he can act cheerful and unconcerned and make them warm milk and peanut butter sandwiches. He tells them jokes, cooks them dinner, reads them longer and longer bedtime stories. Last night they said they were tired and would he please turn out the light. Wounded, Nate wanted to fling his arms wide, cry out:
I won’t be with you much longer!
But surely the point is to avoid such histrionics. He darkened the room, kissed them good night, went to the bathroom to put a hot washcloth over his eyes. Already his reflection in the mirror was fading, the house was forgetting him, he was negligible. He blotted his eyes and went to hunt down Elizabeth.

This also is part of his scheme. He makes a point of trying to have an inconsequential chat with her at least every two days, giving her openings, chances. Perhaps during one of these chats she will dismiss him. They sit in the kitchen and talk about this and that while she drinks tea and he drinks Scotch. Once, not long ago, she would have avoided him in the evenings; she would have gone out or read in
her room. It’s been her contention that they have nothing of value left to say to each other. Now, for purposes of her own, she seems to welcome the chance to consult him on supplies, repairs, the children’s progress at school. This fact alone makes him sweat. She’s asked him a couple of times, with no particular emphasis, how things are going with his ladyfriend, and he’s been noncommittal.

After these chats, during which he has to clench his teeth to avoid glancing at his watch, he leaps onto his bicycle and pedals feverishly down Ossington and along Dundas to catch Lesje before she goes to bed. Twice he’s almost been hit by cars; once he ran into a hydro pole and arrived torn and bleeding. Lesje scrabbled through half-unpacked boxes, looking for Band-Aids, while he dripped onto the grimy linoleum. He knows these rides are dangerous but he also knows that if he doesn’t get there in time Lesje will feel rejected and miserable. On several nights, too exhausted to make the trip, he’s phoned instead. Her voice has been small, remote. He can’t stand to hear her dwindle like that.

No matter how drained he is, he has to make love to her, or at least try to; otherwise she’ll feel he’s backing off. His knees are bruised from the floor, his bad disk is acting up. He wants to ask her to get a bed or at least a mattress, but he can hardly do that without paying half, and at the moment he doesn’t have enough money.