Life Before Man (4 page)

“I don’t call you Lesje Latvian,” he’d said, aggrieved.

“Lithuanian,” she said. “Litvak.” William had trouble with the Baltic states. “I wouldn’t mind if you did.” But she was lying. “Can I call you William Canadian?”

Billy Boy, charming Billy. Where have you been all the day. Shortly after this they had an argument about the Second World War. It’s William’s opinion that the British and, of course, the Canadians, including his father, who was a captain in the Navy, making William the world’s authority, entered the war from superior moral principles, to save the Jews from being reduced to gas
molecules and vest buttons. Lesje disputed this view. Saving a few Jews was a sideline, she said. Really it was grab and counter-grab. Hitler could have frizzled Jews to his heart’s content if he hadn’t snatched Poland and invaded the Netherlands. William found this point of view ungrateful. Lesje then produced the corpse of her Aunt Rachel, who hadn’t been saved, whose anonymous gold teeth had plumped some Swiss bank account. What reply to this indignant ghost? William, routed, went into the bathroom to shave. Lesje felt a little cheap.

(Then there was her other grandmother, her mother’s mother, who’d said: We welcomed Hitler at first. We thought he would be better than the Russians. You see what’s happened now. Which was ironic, since her husband had been practically a Communist, back in the Ukraine. That’s why they had to leave: the politics. He wouldn’t go to church even, he wouldn’t put a foot in a church. I spit on the church, he’d say. Long after his death Lesje’s grandmother was still weeping about it.)

She’s noticed recently that she’s no longer waiting for William to propose to her. Once she thought it would follow as a matter of course. You lived with someone first, to try it out. Then you got married. That’s what her friends from university were doing. But William, she now sees, finds her impossibly exotic. True, he loves her, in a way. He bites her on the neck when they make love. Lesje doesn’t think he’d let himself go like that with a woman of, as she once caught him putting it, his own kind. They would make love like two salmon, remotely, William fertilizing the cool silvery eggs from a suitable distance. He’d think of his children as
issue
. His issue, uncontaminated.

This is the crux: William does not want to have a child by her. With her. Though she’s hinted; though she could spring one on him unannounced. Guess what, William, I have a bun in the oven. Your bun. Well, he’d say, take it out.

Oh, very unfair to William. He admires her mind. He encourages her to use technical language in front of his friends. It gives him a hard-on when she says Pleistocene. He tells her she has beautiful hair. He gazes into her sloe eyes. He’s proud of her as a trophy and as a testimony to his own wide-mindedness. But what would his family in London, Ontario, think?

Lesje pictures this family as numerous and pinkish blond. The members of it spend most of their time playing golf, between strenuous rounds of tennis. When they aren’t doing this they gather on terraces – she sees them doing this even in the winter – and drink cocktails. They are polite to strangers but make remarks behind their backs, such as, “Fellow doesn’t know who his own grandfather is.” Lesje is confident about her grandfathers; it’s the great-grandfathers that are the problem.

She knows William’s family isn’t really like this. But, like her parents, she grants extra rungs on the ladder to anyone with an authentic British name who doesn’t noticeably live on a park bench. She knows she shouldn’t do this. William’s family probably doesn’t have much more money than her own family does. They only have more pretensions.

Once she’d been afraid to meet them, fearing their verdict. Now she’d love to. She’d paint her teeth gold and come in jingling a tambourine and stamping her feet, her head covered with fringed shawls. Living up to their horrified expectations. Her grandmother clapping diminutive mole-paw hands together, creaking with laughter, cheering her on. Blood will tell. “We was talking to God when they was talking to pigs.” As if age, in people as in cheese, was a plus.

“There were no dung beetles in the Neo-Devonian,” Lesje says.

William is brought up short. “I don’t follow you,” he says.

“I was just wondering,” she says. “About the parallel evolution of dung beetles and shit. For instance: which came first, man or
venereal disease? I suppose hosts always have to precede their parasites, but is that really true? Maybe man was invented by viruses, to give them a convenient place to live.”

William decides she’s joking. He laughs. “You’re putting me on,” he says. He thinks she has an offbeat sense of humor.

An Albertosaurus, or – the name Lesje prefers – a Gorgosaurus, pushes through the north wall of the Colonnade and stands there uncertainly, sniffing the unfamiliar smell of human flesh, balancing on its powerful hind legs, its dwarfed front legs with their razor claws held in close to its chest. In a minute William Wasp and Lesje Litvak will be two lumps of gristle. The Gorgosaurus wants, wants. It’s a stomach on legs, it would swallow the world if it could. Lesje, who has brought it here, regards it with friendly objectivity.

Here’s a problem for you, William, Lesje thinks. Solve this.

H
e hasn’t worn a raincoat. The light drizzle beads his heavy sweater, his beard, collects on his forehead, begins to trickle. Since he has no raincoat, since he’s wet and shivering, how can she refuse to let him in?

He parks his bike in the driveway, chaining it to the lilac bush, snapping the lock. As usual; but it isn’t as usual. He hasn’t seen her for a month. Four weeks. Tears from her, hangdog shrugs from him, and a lot of afternoon soap stuff from both of them, including
It’s better this way
. She’s phoned him a couple of times since, wanting him to come over, but he’s avoided it. He doesn’t like doing the same thing over again, he doesn’t like predictability. This time, however, he phoned her.

She lives in an A, 32A, a flat in one of the big older houses east of Sherbourne. Main number at the front, the A entrance around at the side. When he rings she opens the door immediately. She’s been waiting for him. No fresh-washed hair and velvet dressing gown though; just a pair of slacks and a slightly grubby light-green
sweater. She has a glass, half-empty. A lemon peel floats in it, an ice cube. Fortification.

“Well,” she says. “Happy Anniversary.”

“Of what?” he says.

“Saturday was always our day.” She’s on the edge of being drunk, she’s bitter. He can’t blame her. Nate finds it hard to blame anyone for anything. He’s been able to understand her bitterness, most of the time. He just hasn’t been able to do much about it.

“Not that she ever stuck to it,” Martha goes on. “Emergency this, emergency that. So sorry to interrupt, but one of the children’s heads just fell off.” Martha laughs.

Nate wants to take her by the shoulders and give her a good shake, throw her against the wall. But of course he can’t. Instead he stands, dripping onto her hall floor, looking at her dumbly. He feels his body sagging on his spine, the flesh drooping like warm taffy on a sucker stick. Butterscotch. Don’t run with the stick in your mouth, he’d tell the kids, already seeing them fall, seeing the pointed stick skewering up through the roof of the mouth. Running, kneeling, lifting, a howl, his own voice. Oh my god.

“Could you keep the children out of it?” he says.

“Why?” Martha says. “They were in it, weren’t they?” She turns from him and walks down the hall into her living room.

I should leave now, Nate thinks. But he follows her, slipping his wet shoes off first, feet padding along the old rug. The old rut.

Only one light on. She’s arranged it, the lighting. She sits across the room from the light, in shadow, on the sofa. Plush-covered sofa where he first kissed her, unpinned her hair, stroking it down over her wide shoulders. Broad, capable hands. He’d thought he would be safe in those hands, between those knees.

“That was always her excuse,” Martha says. She’s wearing
crocheted wool slippers. Elizabeth would never wear crocheted wool slippers.

“She never disliked you,” Nate says. They’ve done this before.

“No,” Martha says. “Why dislike the housemaid? I did the dirty work for her. She should’ve paid me.”

Nate feels, not for the first time, that he has told this woman too many things. She’s misinterpreting, she’s using his own confidences against him. “That’s unfair,” he says. “She respects you. She never tried to interfere with anything. Why should she?” He doesn’t reply to the crack about the dirty work. Is that how you felt about it? he wants to ask, but he’s afraid of the answer.
Get your ashes hauled
. Casual talk at high-school lockers. He can smell himself, the wet socks, turpentine on his pants. She used to tease him, scrubbing his back as they sat in her claw-footed tub.
Your wife doesn’t take care of you
. In more ways than one.

“Yeah,” says Martha. “Why should she? She always wanted to have her cake and eat it too. That’s you, Nate. Elizabeth’s cake. You’re a piece of cake.”

Nate remembers that when he first saw her, behind her desk at Adams, Prewitt and Stein, she was furtively chewing gum, a habit she renounced when he hinted he didn’t like it. “I understand why you’re angry,” he says. This is one of Elizabeth’s tactics, understanding, and he feels sneaky using it. He knows he doesn’t really understand. Elizabeth doesn’t either, when she says that to him. But it always deflates him.

“I don’t give a piss whether you do or not,” Martha says belligerently. No sops of understanding for her. She’s looking at him directly, though her eyes are in shadow.

“I didn’t come over to talk about this,” Nate says, not sure what exactly they’ve been talking about. He’s never sure in conversations like this. The clear thing is that she feels he’s wrong. He’s wronged her. He’s done her wrong. But he tried to be straightforward about
it from the beginning, he didn’t lie. Someone should give him credit for that.

“So why did you come?” Martha says. “Running away from mother? Wanted some other nice lady to give you a cookie and a tumble in the sack?”

Nate finds this brutal. He doesn’t answer. This is, he realizes, what he had wanted, though he doesn’t want it at the moment.

Martha wipes the back of her hand across her mouth and nose. She’s dimmed the lights, Nate guesses now, not for romantic effect but because she expected to cry and didn’t want him to be able to see too well. “You can’t turn it off and on that easily,” she says.

“I thought we could talk,” Nate says.

“I’m listening,” Martha says. “I’m real good at it.” Nate doesn’t think this is necessarily true. She’s good at it when he talks about her, granted. All ears.
You have the best thighs in the world
. She does have nice thighs, but the best in the world? How would he know?

“I guess you’ve heard what happened,” he says at last. Unable to say why Chris’s death should make him want comfort. By popular wisdom he should be overjoyed, his horns gone, the stain on his honor wiped out by blood.

“You mean about Elizabeth,” Martha says. “Everyone in this town always knows what happens to everybody else. They all came and told me, you can bet on it. They love it. They love to watch me when they drop your name. Both of your names. Elizabeth’s lover dynamited his head. Some of them say Elizabeth’s
man
. So what? What’m I supposed to say? Tough tits? Serves her right? She finally got him?”

Nate has never known her to be so hard, even during their most violent arguments. What he liked about her at first was her vagueness, her lack of focus, an absence of edges that gave her a nebulous shimmer. Now it’s as if she’s been dropped on the sidewalk from a great height and has frozen there, all splayed angles and splinters.

“She hadn’t seen him for a while,” he says, taking Elizabeth’s side as Martha ritually forces him to. “He wanted her to leave the children. She couldn’t do that.”

“Of course not,” Martha says. She stares down at her empty glass, lets it fall to the rug between her feet. “Supermom could never leave the children.” She starts to cry, making no effort now to hide her face. “Move in with me,” she says. “Live with me. I just want us to have a chance.”

Nate thinks, Maybe we already had one. They don’t now. He begins to ease himself forward, out of the chair. She’ll be on him in a minute, arms winding like seaweed around his neck, wet face on his chest, pelvis shoved against his groin while he stands there withered.

“How do you think it feels?” she says. “Like a backstairs romance with the kitchen help, only everyone knows, and you go back at night to your goddamned wife and your goddamned kids and I read murder mysteries till four in the morning just to keep myself sane.”

Nate meditates on the kitchen help. Her choice of metaphor puzzles him. Who has back stairs any more? He remembers one evening, the two of them wrapped in a sheet, on the bed together drinking gin, watching
Upstairs, Downstairs
and laughing. The maid pregnant by the son and heir, being lectured by the ice-faced mother. That was early on, when they were having a good time. It wasn’t a Saturday; it was before Elizabeth said, Let’s be reasonable about this. We have to know we can depend on each other at certain times. She took Thursdays, he took Saturdays because it was the weekend and Martha wouldn’t have to get up early the next morning. And that other evening, when Martha said, I think I’m pregnant. His first thought: Elizabeth won’t put up with that.

If I console her, she’ll say I’m a hypocrite, he thinks. If I don’t, I’m a prick. Out now while there’s time. This was a bad mistake. Pick up my shoes in the front hall, shouldn’t have locked the bike.
“Maybe we can have lunch sometime,” he says at the living-room door.

“Lunch?” Her voice follows him down the hall. “Lunch?” A retreating wail.

He pedals his bicycle through the rain, aiming deliberately for puddles, soaking his legs. Fool. There’s something missing in him that other people have. He can never foresee the future, that’s it, even when it’s clear. It’s a kind of deformity, like being tall. Other people walk through doorways, he hits his head. Once or twice and a rat would learn to stoop. How many times, how long will it take?