Life Before Man (25 page)

After soothing Lesje he pedals home again. There he clatters dishes in the kitchen while frying a late-night snack of liver and onions. He sings sea chanties or puts on a record, an old Travelers or Harry Belafonte from the early sixties. He’s kept these records, not because he’s especially fond of the music as such, but because they recall for him a time when he was fond of it. Before his marriage, before everything; when all directions still seemed possible.

Elizabeth, he knows, can hear what goes on in the kitchen. She can’t stand the Travelers or Harry Belafonte or noise at night in
general, and the smell of liver makes her sick. He found this out early in their marriage and abstained, a compromise. She’s big on the value of compromises. He’s hoping now that his blatant failure to compromise will convince her she’s had enough of him.

He doesn’t really feel like singing, or eating either. By midnight he usually has a grinding headache. But he forces himself, tapping his knife against his plate and yelling along with Harry, his mouth full of partly chewed meat. “I see great big black
TARANTULA
,” he bellows. Then, crooning, “Come back, Liza, come back, girl, Wipe de tear from yo’ eye …” Once, during the era of Chris, he’d sung this song with ridiculous sentimentality.
Liza
was Elizabeth and he wanted her to come back.

He leaves his dishes in the sink, or if he’s feeling especially daring, on the kitchen table itself, defying Elizabeth’s hand-printed sign:

CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS!

Then he staggers up the stairs, gulps four aspirin with codeine, and crashes into bed.

Ordinarily this behavior would produce quick results. A cold request, which, if not obeyed, would lead to a frontal attack, during which he would be accused in a chillingly level voice of everything from chauvinism to arrogant selfishness to sadism. In the first years these arguments convinced him. His inability to complain, to complain skillfully and with feeling, put him at a disadvantage: when she challenged him to produce some habit of hers equally offensive to him, which she was of course prepared to give up on the spot, he couldn’t come up with anything. He was used to thinking that everyone’s rage and sense of oppression was justified; everyone’s but his own. Anyway, he wasn’t oppressed. At parties during the raucous sixties he’d been called a white pig, a male pig, even, because of his last name, a Fascist German pig. Instead of invoking his Unitarian
past, his long-gone lapsed-Mennonite grandfather whose cheese-factory windows were smashed in 1914 because of his name, his father who’d died in the war, he found it less complicated to turn away and go out to the kitchen for another beer. Nor had he ever told Elizabeth the house was as much his as hers; he didn’t really believe it. He stopped eating liver except in restaurants and played his Harry Belafonte records only when Elizabeth wasn’t home. The children liked them.

This time Elizabeth hasn’t responded to his transgressions. If he happens to see her the next morning, she’s calm and smiling. She even asks him if he’s slept well.

Nate knows he can’t keep up his divided life much longer. He’ll get an ulcer, he’ll implode. An incoherent anger is growing in him, not only with Elizabeth but with the children: what right do they have to hook him, hold him back? Also with Lesje, who is forcing him to make painful decisions. His anger isn’t fair, he knows it. He dislikes being unfair. He will take the first step today, now.

He kneels beside the pile of old newspapers. He’ll wrap and box the small hand tools first and transport the boxes, one by one, roped onto the carrying rack of his bicycle. For the larger machines and unfinished toys he’ll have to rent a truck. He shoves to the back of his mind the question of how he’s going to pay for it.

He picks up a gouge, sliding his hand around the handle. In the early days of euphoria, after he quit his job, when he still believed he was returning somehow to dignity, the wisdom and simplicity of the craftsman, he spent a lot of time carving special handles for his hand tools. On some he incised his initials; on others he made decorative bands, flowers and leaves or geometrical motifs, vaguely Indian. On this particular gouge he made a hand, carved as if the wooden fingers were holding the handle, so that every time he picked up the gouge there was another hand close within his own.
It pleased him to use these tools of his, he felt secure, rooted, as if by carving them himself he’d made them already old. He kneels, holding the small wooden hand, trying to recall that pleasure. Holding, holding on. But the tools are floating away from him, diminished, like toys he once played with. The plastic machine gun, the man’s hat he wore with the brim turned down, pretending it was a pith helmet.

He places the gouge on a sheet of newspaper, and rolls, starting at the bottom corner. Then, methodically, reading headlines as he goes, he rolls the chisels, the screwdrivers, the rasps, placing the wrapped tools side by side in the bottom of the first box. Old events flash past him, blacken his fingers: the Pakistani pushed onto the subway tracks, he remembers that. A broken leg. The child who strangled while being forced by her mother to stand on one foot with a rope around her neck as punishment. Gossip about Margaret Trudeau, for weeks. An exploding butcher’s shop in Northern Ireland. Widening rift between English and French Canada. Murdered Portuguese shoeshine boy; cleanup of Toronto’s Sin Strip. Quebec language laws: Greek grocers in all-Greek districts forbidden to put up Coca-Cola signs in Greek. He flips through the papers, recalling his own reactions when he first read them.

Nate stops wrapping. He’s crouching now on the cellar floor, absorbed in old stories, which come to him across time as one long blurred howl of rage and pain. And his own recognition: What else can be expected? Newspapers are distilled futility. Whenever his mother is being too irritating, too optimistic, he wants to say to her merely, Read the papers. Sheer delusion, the belief that anything can be done, ever. She does read the papers, of course. She even keeps a clipping file.

He’s deep in an editorial warning against the creeping Balkanization of Canada when the cellar door swings open. He looks
up: Elizabeth is standing at the top of the stairs, her face shadowed by the light behind her head. Nate scrambles to his feet. The chisel he’s been holding, intending to wrap it, clanks against the floor.

“You’re home early,” he says. He feels as if he’s been caught burying someone in the cellar.

Elizabeth has a cardigan over her shoulders. She draws it further around her; slowly and without speaking she descends the stairs. Nate backs against the workbench.

“You look as if you’re packing,” Elizabeth says. He can see now that she’s smiling.

“Well, I was just sorting out some tools,” Nate says. Now that it’s time, he wants, wildly, irrationally, to deny everything. “To store them,” he says.

Elizabeth stands at the bottom of the stairs and surveys the room, the dingy windows, the rags, the piles of sawdust and shavings he hasn’t bothered to sweep up.

“How’s business?” she asks. She stopped asking that a long time ago. She has no interest in it; she almost never comes down here. All she wants from it is his half of the rent.

“Great,” he lies. “Just fine.”

Elizabeth gazes back at him. “Isn’t it time we stopped this?” she says.

E
lizabeth tightens the cardigan, around her shoulders, across her back. Her arms are crossed, the wool she’s holding bunched into fists. Straitjacket. She stands in the hall, watching the front door as if she expects someone to come through it. But she doesn’t expect anyone to come through it. Doors are what people go out by, in their own ways. The doors close behind them and she’s left looking at the place where they’ve just been. Conscious, semiconscious, semi-conscience. Piss on them all.

Nate has just gone through the door, carrying a cardboard box. He set the box down on the porch so he could turn to close the door carefully, ever so carefully behind him. He’s pedaling off to screw his stringy ladyfriend, as he’s been doing for weeks, pretending otherwise. This time he’s taking some rasps and chisels with him. Elizabeth hopes he will put them to good use.

In the ordinary course of things she wouldn’t have minded this liaison. She doesn’t feel she’s a dog in the manger: if she doesn’t want a particular bone, anyone else is welcome to it. As long as Nate does his share with the house and children, or what they’ve wearily agreed
is his share, he can help himself to any diversions he chooses. Bowling, building model airplanes, fornication, it’s all the same to her. But she resents being taken for a fool. Any ninny could have told he was packing; why did he bother to deny it? As for his moronic performance with the midnight fried liver and Harry Belafonte records, a two-year-old could see through it.

She turns away from the door and heads for the kitchen, her body dragging, suddenly heavy. She was calm, she’s pleased with how calm she was, but now she feels as if she’s swallowed a bottle of aspirin. Small holes glow red in her stomach, eating their way into her flesh. A bottle of stars. All she wanted was a straight confession, and she’s accomplished that. He admitted he plans to move his workshop from their cellar to some unspecified place. They both know where this is, but for the moment she’s resisted the urge to press further.

She decides to make herself a cup of coffee, then changes her mind. She will eat no more acid this evening. Instead she pours boiling water on a chicken Oxo cube, and sits stirring methodically, waiting for it to dissolve.

She walks through the future, step by step. From this point it can go two ways. He will leave, gradually, without further prompting. Or she can speed up the process by telling him to go. There is no third way. He will not stay now, even if she begs him to.

So she will have to ask him, tell him to go. If she can’t save anything else from the wreckage she will save face. They’ll have a civilized discussion and they will both agree they are doing the best thing for the children. She will then be able to repeat this conversation to her friends, communicating her joy at this solution to all their problems, radiating quiet confidence and control.

Of course there are the children, the real ones, not the fantasy ones they will drag out as counters in the bargaining process. The real children will not think this is best for them. They will hate it, and Nate will have the advantage of being able to say,
Your
mother asked me to leave
. But she will not be deserted, she refuses to be deserted against her will. She refuses to be pathetic. Her martyr mother, sniveling in a chair. She knows she’s being manipulated into this position, by Nate – by Nate! – and she dislikes the thought intensely. It’s like being beaten at an intricate and subtle game of chess by the world tiddlywinks champion. But she has no other choice.

She’ll go on a diet, later, after he’s actually gone. That’s part of the ritual. She’ll tart herself up, maybe get her hair done, and everyone will say how much better she’s looking than she did before Nate left. She finds these tactics squalid and disapproves of them when she witnesses them in others. But what else is there? Trips to Europe she can’t afford, religious conversion? She’s already had a younger lover; she isn’t in any hurry to do that again.

She rocks slightly in her chair, hugging her elbows. She’s shivering. She wants Chris to come back. She wants anyone, just some arms that aren’t hollow and knitted. The cracks between the boards of the table are widening; grey light wells from them, cold. Dry ice, gas, she can hear it, a hushing sound, moving towards her face. It eats color. She pulls her hands back from the table, clamps them together in her lap. There’s the grip of veins in her neck. Fingers twisting hair across her throat.

She’s staked to this chair, she can’t move, a chill moves up her back. Her eyes flicker, sweep the room for something that will save her. Familiar. The stove, pot on it, frying pan unwashed, the cutting board by the sink. The frayed and blackened oven glove, not that.
CLEAN UP
. The refrigerator. Nancy’s drawing from Grade One stuck to it, a girl smiling, the sky, the sun. Joy, she thought when she placed it.

She stares at the picture, pressing her hands together, and for an instant the sun shines. But there’s no friendly smile, malice is there in the yellow, in the hair. The blue of the sky too is an illusion, the
sun is blackening, its tentacles curl like burning paper. Behind the blue sky is not white enamel but the dark of outer space, blackness shot with fiery bubbles. Somewhere out there the collapsed body floats, no bigger than a fist, tugging at her with immense gravity. Irresistible. She falls towards it, space filling her ears.

After a while she’s in the kitchen. The house is ticking around her once more, the furnace hums, warm air sighs through the registers. From upstairs comes the chuckle of television; she can hear water singing in the pipes, one child or another running carelessly from the bathroom along the hall. So far she can always get back. Self-indulgence, Auntie Muriel would say. Make yourself useful. She concentrates on the yellow circle made by the top of the cup, willing her fingers to unclamp, move forward. She lifts the cup and warms her cold hands with it. Liquid slops onto her lap. She sips, filling time. When her hands are steady she makes a piece of toast and spreads it with peanut butter. She will take one step at a time.
Down to earth
.

She rummages for the felt pen she makes the grocery lists with and begins to jot down figures. In one column, the mortgage, the insurance, the electricity and heat, the monthly food bill. Children’s clothes and school supplies. Dentists’ bills: Janet will need an orthodontist. Cat food. They don’t have a cat, but she’s bloody well going to get one and charge it to Nate. His replacement. Repairs. She’ll have the roof fixed, finally, and the porch step.

In the other column she puts the rent from the tenants. She doesn’t want to be unfair, just accurate, and she’s willing to offset the tenants’ rent against the mortgage.