Life Before Man (5 page)

After half an hour he stops at the corner of Dupont and Spadina, where he knows there’s a phone booth. He leans his bike against the side of the booth, goes in. Glass cubicle, light on, total exposure. Feeble-minded creep goes into booth, removes clothes, stands there waiting for Superman to take over his body while people stare from passing cars and some old lady calls the police.

He takes a dime from his pocket, holds it. His token, his talisman, his one hope of salvation. At the other end of the line a thin woman waits, her pale face framed by dark hair, her hand lifted, fingers upraised in blessing.

No answer.

E
lizabeth sits in her kitchen, waiting to be surprised. She’s always surprised at this time of the year; she’s also surprised on her birthday, at Christmas and on Mother’s Day, which the children insist on celebrating even though she tells them it’s commercial and they don’t have to. She’s good at being surprised. She’s glad she’s put in a lot of practice: she’ll be able to walk through it tonight with no slips, the exclamation, the pleased smile, the laugh. Her remoteness from them, the distance she has to travel even to hear what they’re saying. She wants to be able to touch them, hold them, but she can’t. Good-night kisses on her cheek, cold dewdrops; their mouths perfect pink flowers.

The smell of scorching pumpkin drifts down the hall: their two jack-o’-lanterns, displayed side by side in the living-room window, finally, the legitimate way on the legitimate night. Already admired sufficiently by her. Scooped out on spread newspapers in the kitchen, handfuls of white seeds in their network of viscous threads, some grotesque and radical form of brain surgery; two little girls
crouching over the orange heads with spoons and paring knives. Little mad scientists. They were so intense about it, especially Nancy. She wanted hers to have horns. Finally Nate suggested carrots, and Nancy’s pumpkin now has lopsided horns in addition to its scowl. Janet’s is more sedate: a curved smile, half-moon eyes upturned. Serenity if you look at it from a certain angle, idiocy from another. Nancy’s has a fearsome energy, a demonic glee.

They will burn this way all evening and then the festival will be over. Janet, reasonable child, will consign her pumpkin to the garbage, clearing the decks, ready for the next thing. Nancy, if last year is any indication, will protect hers, keeping it on her dresser until it sags and rots, unwilling to throw it away.

They’ve made her turn out the light and sit in darkness, with only one candle; she wasn’t able to explain to them why she doesn’t want to do this. The light flickers on the walls, on the dirty dishes waiting to be scraped and put into the dishwasher, on the sign she herself tacked to the kitchen cupboard over a year ago:

CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS!

Sensible advice. It’s still sensible advice, but the kitchen itself has changed. It’s no longer familiar, it’s no longer the kind of place in which sensible advice can be followed. Or at least not by her. On the refrigerator there’s a painting, curling at the edges, Nancy’s from last year; a girl smiles a red smile, the sun shines, bestowing spokes of yellow; the sky is blue, all is as it should be. A foreign country.

A dark shape jumps at her from the doorway. “Boo, Mum.”

“Oh, darling,” Elizabeth says. “Let me see.”

“Am I really scary, Mum?” Nancy says, clawing her fingers menacingly.

“You’re very scary, love,” Elizabeth says. “Isn’t that wonderful.”

Nancy has made yet another variation of her favorite costume. She calls it a monster, every year. This time she’s pinned orange paper scales to her black leotard; she’s modified Janet’s old cat’s head mask by adding silver tinfoil horns and four red fangs, two upper, two lower. Her eyes gleam through the cat eyes. Her tail, Janet’s former cat’s tail, now has three red cardboard prongs. Elizabeth feels something other than rubber boots might have been more suitable, but knows it’s fatal to criticize. Nancy is so excited she might start to cry.

“You didn’t scream,” Nancy says reproachfully, and Elizabeth realizes she’s forgotten this. An error, a failure.

“That’s because you took my breath away,” she says. “I was too frightened to scream.”

Nancy is satisfied with this. “They’ll all be really scared,” she says. “They won’t know who I am. Your turn,” she says into the hall, and Janet makes a prim entrance. Last year she was a ghost, the year before that she was a cat, both standard. She tends to play it safe; to be too original is to be laughed at, as Nancy sometimes is.

This year she wears no mask. Instead she’s made her face up, red lips, arched black brows, rouged cheeks. It isn’t Elizabeth’s makeup, since Elizabeth doesn’t as a rule use any. Certainly not red lipstick. She has on a shawl made from a gaudy flowered tablecloth someone gave them – Nate’s mother? – and which Elizabeth promptly donated to the play-box. And underneath it a dress of Elizabeth’s, hitched and rolled around the waist to shorten it, belted with a red bandana. She looks surprisingly old, like a woman shrunken by age to the size of a ten-year-old; or like a thirty-year-old dwarf. A disconcertingly whorish effect.

“Wonderful, darling,” Elizabeth says.

“I’m supposed to be a gypsy,” Janet says, knowing with her usual tact that Elizabeth can’t be totally depended on to figure this out and
wanting to save her the embarrassment of asking. When she was younger she explained her drawings this way. Nancy, on the other hand, was hurt if you didn’t know.

“Do you tell fortunes?” Elizabeth asks.

Janet smiles shyly with her bright red lips. “Yes,” she says; then, “Not really.”

“Where did you get my dress?” Elizabeth asks carefully. They’re supposed to ask before borrowing things, but she doesn’t want to spoil the evening by making an issue of it.

“Dad said I could,” Janet says politely. “He said you weren’t wearing it any more.”

It’s a blue dress, dark blue; the last time she wore it was with Chris. His hands were the last hands to undo the hook at the back, since, when she put the dress on to go home, she didn’t bother to do the hook back up again. It’s upsetting to see her daughter wearing it, wearing that invitation, that sexual flag. Nate has no right to make a decision like this about something of hers. But it’s true, she isn’t wearing it any more.

“I wanted you to be surprised,” Janet adds, sensing her dismay.

“That’s all right, darling,” Elizabeth says: the eternal magic words. It’s somehow more important to them to surprise her than to surprise Nate. Occasionally they even consult him. “Has your dad seen you yet?” she asks.

“Yes,” Janet says.

“He pinned on my tail,” Nancy says, hopping on one foot. “He’s going out.”

Elizabeth goes to the front door to see them off, standing in the lighted oblong as they negotiate the porch steps, carefully because of Nancy’s mask and tail. They’re carrying shopping bags, the biggest ones they could find. She’s been over the instructions: Only this block. Stay with Sarah because she’s older. No crossing in the
middle of the street, only at corners. Don’t bother people if they don’t want to answer the door. Some of the people around here may not understand, their customs are different. Home by nine.

Voices other than theirs are already calling:
Shell out. Shell out. The witches are out
. It’s a revel, one of the many from which she once felt and still feels excluded. They weren’t allowed to have pumpkins and they weren’t allowed to dress up and shout in the streets like the others. They had to go to bed early and lie in the darkness, listening to the distant laughter. Her Auntie Muriel hadn’t wanted them running up dentists’ bills by eating a lot of candy.

F
irst, Nate washes his hands carefully with the oatmeal soap Elizabeth favors these days. There’s something harsh about it, Scottish, penitential. Once she’d indulged herself in sandalwood, cinnamon, musk, Arabian fragrances, pastel and lavish at the same time. That was when she was buying lotions with exotic names and the occasional bottle of perfume. She hadn’t rubbed these lotions on him and it wasn’t for his benefit she dabbed herself behind the ears, though he could dimly remember a time when she might have. He could remember it vividly, he knows, if he wanted to, but he doesn’t want to think about it, those odors, that fragrant moth dance performed for him alone. Why tease those nerves? Everything is gone, the bottles are empty, things get used up.

So now it’s oatmeal soap, with its hints of chapped skin and chilblains. And, for the hands, nothing fancier than glycerine and rosewater.

Nate applies some of this to his own hands. He doesn’t usually dip into Elizabeth’s cosmetics; only when, as now, his hands feel clumsy and raw, abraded by the Varsol he uses to get the paint and
polyurethane off them. There’s always a brown line left though, a half-moon around the base of each nail; and he can never quite rid himself of the paint smell. He welcomed this smell once. It said,
You exist
. Far from the abstractions of paper, torts and writs, the convolutions of a language deliberately dried so that it was empty of any sensuous values. That was in the days when physical objects were thought to have a magic, a mysterious aura superior to the fading power of, say, politics or law. He’d quit in his third year of practice. Take an ethical stance. Grow. Change. Realize your potential.

Elizabeth had approved of this move because it was the sort of thing that would infuriate her aunt. She’d even said they could live on her salary till he got started. Her indulgence proved that she wasn’t at all like Auntie Muriel. But as time went on and he did little more than break even, she’d been less and less approving. Supportive, as they said. This house, too small really, the tenants on the third floor, the workshop in the basement, were supposed to be temporary, she’d reminded him. Then stopped reminding.

It’s partly her fault. Half of her wants a sensitive, impoverished artist, the other half demands a forceful, aggressive lawyer. It was the lawyer she married, then found too conventional. What is he supposed to do?

Occasionally, though by no means all the time, Nate thinks of himself as a lump of putty, helplessly molded by the relentless demands and flinty disapprovals of the women he can’t help being involved with. Dutifully, he tries to make them happy. He fails not because of any intrinsic weakness or lack of will, but because their own desires are hopelessly divided. And there’s more than one of them, these women. They abound, they swarm.

“Toys?” his mother said. “Is that useful?” Meaning: all over the world people are being tortured and imprisoned and shot, and you make toys. She’d wanted him to be a radical lawyer, defending the unjustly accused. How to tell her that, apart from the sterile monetary
transactions, contracts, real estate, most of the people he’d had to deal with at Adams, Prewitt and Stein had in fact been accused justly? She would have said it was only training, an apprenticeship he had to undergo to make him ready for the big crusade.

The Amnesty International newsletter still arrives every month, his mother’s copy, marked with asterisks to show him where to send his courteously worded letters of protest. Children tortured in front of their mothers. Sons disappearing, to surface months later, fingernails missing, skins covered with burns and abrasions, skulls crushed, tossed on roadsides. Old men in damp cells dying of kidney problems. Scientists drugged in Soviet lunatic asylums. South African blacks shot or kicked to death while “escaping.” His mother has a map of the world taped to her kitchen wall, where she can contemplate it while drying the plates. She sticks little stars on it, red ones, the kind the teacher used to dole out for second-best in printing. These innocent grade-school stars mark each new reported case of torture or mass murder; the world is now a haze of stars, constellation upon constellation.

Nevertheless his mother crusades, dauntless astronomer, charting new atrocities, sending out her communications, politely written and neatly typed, unaware of the futility of what she is doing. As far as Nate is concerned she may as well be sending these letters to Mars. She’d brought him up to believe that God is the good in people. Way to fight, God. Nate finds these newsletters of hers so overwhelmingly painful that he’s no longer able to read them. As soon as they arrive, he slips them into the wastepaper basket, then goes to the cellar to pound and chisel. He consoles himself by thinking that his toys are the toys the tortured children would play with if they could. Every child should have toys. To remove all toys because some do not have them is not the answer. Without his toys, surely there would be nothing to fight for. So he
will let his mother, worthy woman that she is, compose the letters; he will make the toys.

Tonight he’s been finishing rocking horses; five of them, he finds it easier to do them in lots of five. He sanded them yesterday. Today he’s been painting eyes. Round eyes, expressionless, the eyes of creatures made to be ridden for the pleasure of others. The black eyeliner of the girls on the Strip. This isn’t how he intended the horses to look: he intended joy. But more and more, recently, the toys he makes have this blank look, as if they can’t see him.

He no longer tells people he makes handmade wooden toys in his basement. He says he’s in the toy business. This isn’t because cottage industry has ceased to be viewed as charismatic or even cute. He never thought of it as charismatic or cute; he thought of it as something he might be able to do well. To do one thing well: this was what he wanted. Now he does it well enough. He has a monthly balance sheet. After supplies and the gouge the stores take are deducted, he has money left to pay half the mortgage interest and to buy groceries, cigarettes, enough liquor to coast on. Elizabeth isn’t supporting him. She just acts as though she is.

Nate begins to shave. He lathers his throat, meaning only to trim around the edges of his beard, free his neck and the underside of his jaw of bristles; but he finds the razor moving upwards, circling the edges of his beard like a lawnmower circling a lawn. He’s shaved his beard half off before he knows that it’s his intention to destroy it. From behind the coarse dark hair his face emerges, the face he hasn’t seen in five years, pallid, blood-speckled, dismayed at this exposure. His hands have decided it’s time for him to be someone else.