Life Before Man (3 page)

This is the third time. Twice last week and now. This morning she mentioned it, just as a piece of conversation, to the girls at work, women at work, flashing her teeth in a quick smile to show she wasn’t worried about it, then covering her mouth immediately with her hand. She thinks of her teeth as too large for her face: they make her look skeletal, hungry.

Elizabeth Schoenhof was there, in the cafeteria where they always went at ten-thirty if they weren’t working too hard. She’s from Special Projects. Lesje sees a fair amount of her because fossils are one of the more popular museum features and Elizabeth likes to work them in. This time she’d come over to their table to say she needed a little of Lesje’s material for a display-case series. She wanted to juxtapose some of the small items from Canadiana with natural objects from the same geographical regions.
Artifact and Environment
, she was calling it. She could use some stuffed animals to go with the pioneer axes and traps, and a few fossil bones for atmosphere.

“This is an old country,” she said. “We want people to see that.”

Lesje is against this eclectic sort of promotion, though she sees the need for it. The general public. Still, it trivializes, and Lesje registered an inner objection when Elizabeth asked, in that competent maternal manner of hers, whether Lesje couldn’t find her some really interesting fossils. Weren’t all fossils interesting? Lesje said politely that she would see what she could do.

Elizabeth, adept at cataloguing the reactions of others, for which Lesje holds her in some awe – she herself, she feels, cannot do this – explained carefully that she meant visually interesting. She really would appreciate it, she said.

Lesje, always responsive to appreciation, warmed. If Elizabeth wanted some outsize phalanges and a cranium or two she was welcome to them. Besides, Elizabeth looked terrible, white as a sheet, though everyone said she was coping marvelously. Lesje can’t imagine herself in that situation, so she can’t predict how she herself would cope. Of course everyone knew, it had been in the papers, and Elizabeth had not made much of an effort to hide the facts while it was going on.

They all scrupulously avoided mentioning Chris or anything relating to him in front of Elizabeth. Lesje caught herself blinking when Elizabeth said she wanted to use a flintlock in the display. She herself wouldn’t have chosen guns. But perhaps these blind spots were necessary, were part of coping marvelously. Without them, how could you do it?

To change the subject she said brightly, “Guess what? I’ve been getting anonymous phone calls.”

“Obscene?” Marianne asked.

Lesje said no. “Whoever it is just lets the phone ring and then when I answer he hangs up.”

“Wrong number, probably,” Marianne said, her interest flagging.

“How do you know it’s a he?” Trish asked.

Elizabeth said, “Excuse me.” She stood up, paused for a moment, then turned and walked steadily as a somnambulist across the floor towards the door.

“It’s awful,” Trish said. “She must feel terrible.”

“Did I say something wrong?” Lesje asked. She hadn’t meant to.

“Didn’t you know?” Marianne said. “He used to phone her like that. At least once a night, for the last month. After he quit here. She told Philip Burroughs, oh, quite a while before it happened. You’d think she would’ve known it was building up to something.”

Lesje blushed and brought her hand up to the side of her face. There were always things she didn’t know. Now Elizabeth would
think she’d done that on purpose and would dislike her. She couldn’t figure out how that particular piece of gossip had slipped by her. They’d probably talked about it right here at this table and she hadn’t been paying attention.

Lesje goes back to the living room, sits down in the chair beside her spilled coffee, and lights a cigarette. When she smokes she doesn’t inhale. Instead she holds her right hand in front of her mouth with the cigarette between the first two fingers, thumb along the jawbone. That way she can talk and laugh in safety, blinking through the smoke that rises into her eyes. Her eyes are her good point. She can see why they wore veils, half-veils, in those Middle Eastern countries. It had nothing to do with modesty. Sometimes when she’s alone she holds one of her flowered pillowcases across the lower half of her face, over the bridge of her nose, that nose just a little too long, a little too curved for this country. Her eyes, dark, almost black, look back at her in the bathroom mirror, enigmatic above the blue and purple flowers.

E
lizabeth sits on the grey sofa in the underwater light of her living room, hands folded in her lap sedately, as if waiting for a plane. The light here is never direct, since the room faces north; she finds this peaceful. The sofa is not really grey, not only grey; it has a soft mauve underfigure, a design like veining; a batik. She chose it because it didn’t hurt her eyes.

On the mushroom-colored rug, near her left foot, there’s a scrap of orange crêpe paper, a spillover from something the children are doing in their room. A scrap of flame, jarring. But she lets it lie. Ordinarily she would bend, pick it up, crumple it. She doesn’t like anyone disturbing this room, the children or Nate with his trails of sawdust and spots of linseed oil. They can make as much mess as they like in their own rooms, where she doesn’t have to cope with it. She once thought of having plants in this room as well as in her bedroom but decided against it. She doesn’t want anything else she will have to take care of.

She closes her eyes. Chris is in the room with her, a weight,
heavy, breathless, like the air before a thunderstorm. Sultry. Sultan. Sullen. But it isn’t because he’s dead, he was always like that. Backing her against the door, his arms clamping around her, shoulders massive when she tried to push him off, face heavily down on hers, force of gravity. Leaning on her. I won’t let you go yet. She hates it when anyone has power over her. Nate doesn’t have that kind of power, he never had. She married him easily, like trying on a shoe.

She’s in the room on Parliament Street, drinking wine, the slopped glasses making mulberry rings on the linoleum of his rented table, she can see the design on the oilcloth, tasteless wreaths of flowers, lime-green on yellow, as if it’s been burnt into her eyes. They always whisper in that room, though there’s no need to. Nate is several miles away from them and he knows where she is anyway, she leaves the number in case of an emergency. Their whispers and his eyes with their flat hot surfaces, a glint like nailheads. Copperheads. Pennies on the eyes. Gripping her hand across the table as though, if he lets go, she will slide down past the edge of the table, the edge of some cliff or quicksand, and be lost forever. Or he will.

Listening, her eyes on the wrinkled surface of the table, the squat candle he bought from some street peddler, the deliberately tacky plastic flowers and the owl he’d stolen from work, not even mounted, eyeless, his macabre joke. The wreaths turning slowly on the surface of the table as on an oily sea, floating out; somewhere they did that as a blessing. Then rising, the violence in his hands held back, everything held back, falling, salt body stretching along her, dense as earth, on that bed she would never stay to sleep in, the sheets always a little damp, smoky, holding back until nothing could be held back. She has never seen that room by daylight. She refuses
to imagine what it looks like now. The mattress bare. Someone would have come, cleaned the floor.

She opens her eyes. She must focus on something simple and clear. There are three bowls on the sideboard, pinkish mauve, porcelain, Kayo’s, he’s one of the best. She’s confident in her taste, she knows enough to have earned that confidence. The sideboard is pine, she bought it before pine became fashionable, had it stripped down before having things stripped down became fashionable. She couldn’t afford it now. It’s a good piece, the bowls are good pieces. She wouldn’t have anything in this room that was not a good piece. She lets her eyes slide over the bowls, over their subtle colors, their slightly asymmetrical curves, wonderful to have that sense, where to be off balance. There’s nothing in them. What could you possibly put into such bowls? Not flowers or letters. They were meant to hold something else, they were meant for offerings. Right now they hold their own space, their own beautifully shaped absence.

There was your room and there was everything else outside, and that barrier between the two. You carried that room around with you like a smell, it was a smell like formaldehyde and the insides of old cupboards, mousy, secretive, like musk, dusky and rich. Whenever I was with you I was in that room, even when we were outside, even when we were here. I’m in it now, only now you’ve locked the door, brown door with scaling paint, varnish, the brass-colored lock and the chain, two bullet holes through the wood where, you told me, they’d been shooting in the hallway the week before. It wasn’t a safe neighborhood. I always took taxis, asked the driver to wait until I’d pressed the buzzer and was safe in the foyer with its gap-toothed mosaic floor. Safe, always a joke. The door’s locked, not for the first
time; you don’t want me ever to get out. You always knew I wanted to get out. But at the same time we were conspirators, we knew things about each other no one else will ever know. In some ways I trust you more than I’ve ever trusted anyone.

I have to go now, she says. He’s twisting a length of her hair, twisting and untwisting it. He runs his index finger between her lips, left-handed, across her teeth; she can taste wine and her own sweat, taste of herself, blood from a bitten lip, she no longer knows whose.

Why, he says.

I just have to. She doesn’t want to say
the children
because it will make him angry. But she doesn’t want them to wake up and not know where she is.

He doesn’t answer; he keeps twisting and untwisting her hair, his own hair brushing her neck like feathers, his fingers sliding now over her chin and throat, as if he’s deaf, as if he can no longer hear her.

L
esje is walking beside William, hand in cool hand. There are no dinosaurs here; only similar walkers, on the prowl like themselves, an apparently aimless prowl through the lighted grid of the central city. In passing, Lesje glances into the windows of dress shops, department stores, appraising the cadaverous mannequins who stand with their pelvises thrust forward, hands angular on hips, legs apart, one knee bent. If these bodies were in motion they would be gyrating, jerking, a stripper’s orgasmic finale. Since they are frozen plaster and wire, however, they are in good taste.

Lesje has been spending quite a lot of time lately in these same shops, on her way home from work. She flips through the racks, looking for something that might become her, something she might become. She almost never buys anything. The dresses she tries on are long, flowing, embroidered, very different from the denims and subdued classics she habitually wears. Some with full skirts; the peasant look. How her grandmother would laugh. That little sound, like a door creaking, that used to come from behind her tiny walnut-colored hands.

She’s thought about getting her ears pierced. Sometimes, after checking through the dresses, she goes to the perfume counter and tries the testers on her wrists. William says he isn’t interested in clothes. His one stipulation is that she must not cut her hair. This is all right, since she doesn’t want to cut it. She’s not betraying anything.

William asks her if she’d like something to drink. She says she wouldn’t mind a coffee. They didn’t come out to drink; they’d intended to go to a movie. But they spent too much time poring over the entertainment pages of the
Star
, trying to decide. Each wanted the other to take the responsibility. Lesje wanted to see a re-run of
King Kong
at the university film series. William finally confessed that he’d always wanted to see
Jaws
. Lesje didn’t mind, she could see how well they’d done the shark, which was after all one of the more primitive life forms still extant. She asked William if he knew that sharks had floating stomachs and if you suspended one by its tail it would become paralyzed. William didn’t know this. By the time they got to
Jaws
it was sold out and
King Kong
had started half an hour earlier. So they’re walking instead.

Now they’re sitting at a little white table on the second level of the Colonnade. William is having a Galliano, Lesje a Viennese coffee. Gravely she licks whipped cream from her spoon, while William, having forgiven her for causing him to miss
Jaws
, is explaining his latest problem, which has to do with whether more energy is lost in the long run by using the heat from incinerated garbage to run steam generators than by just letting the stuff go up in smoke. William is a specialist in environmental engineering, though the small raucous voice that occasionally makes itself heard behind Lesje’s studiously attentive face refers to it as sewage disposal. However, Lesje admires William’s job and agrees with him that it’s more important to the survival of the human race than hers is. Which is true, they’re all in danger of drowning in their own
shit. William will save them. You can see it just by looking at him, his confidence, his enthusiasm. He orders another Galliano and expounds on his plans for generating methane gas from decomposing excrement. Lesje murmurs applause. Among other things, it would solve the oil crisis.

(The real question is: Does she care whether the human race survives or not? She doesn’t know. The dinosaurs didn’t survive and it wasn’t the end of the world. In her bleaker moments, of which, she realizes, this is one, she feels the human race has it coming. Nature will think up something else. Or not, as the case may be.)

William is talking about dung beetles. He’s a good man; why is she so unappreciative? Dung beetles were once of interest to her. The way in which Australia solved its pasturage problem – layers of dried sheep raisins and cow pads keeping the grass from growing – by a massive importation of giant African dung beetles, was once a beacon of hope. Like William, she saw it as elegant ecological problem-solving. But she’s heard it before, and before. Finally it’s William’s optimism, his belief that every catastrophe is merely a problem looking for a brilliant solution, that gets to her. She thinks of William’s brain as pink-cheeked, hairless. William Wasp, she used to call him, fondly enough, before she realized that he found it a racial slur.