Life Before Man (6 page)

He rinses his face. He doesn’t have any after-shave – it’s so long since he’s used it – so he rubs some of Elizabeth’s glycerine and rose-water over his new-mown skin. The face that looks back at him from the bathroom mirror is more vulnerable, but also younger and
grimmer, the jaw clearly visible now, its furry wisdom gone. A man stroking his beard is one thing, a man stroking his jaw is another.

Before leaving the house he goes into his own room and scrabbles through the piles of coins on his bureau, looking for dimes. Then he changes his socks. He doesn’t expect to be taking his socks off this evening; it’s highly unlikely that he will. However. His feet are white and rootlike, the toenails greyish yellow from the cellar life they’re forced to lead. He sees his feet for an instant, browned and running, on sand, on sun-warmed rock. Far from here.

L
esje and William are having a game of cribbage. They sit at a card table, the same card table on which they eat meals when they eat together, beside their picture window, which has a breathtaking view of the picture window in the apartment building opposite theirs. This window is lighted, since it’s dark, and two people are sitting behind it, eating what Lesje takes to be spaghetti. On the streets below, Lesje assumes, it’s all happening. That was why she wanted to live here, at the crux, in the heart: because it would all be happening. “It” and “all” are words that have, however, retained their abstractness. She hasn’t yet found either of them.

Lesje has stuck a paper jack-o’-lantern, purchased at Woolworth’s, to the inside of their own picture window. Last year she bought some candy, hoping to be visited by a parade of little children in costumes; but no children, it appears, can penetrate to the fourteenth floor of this apartment building. The people who live here, whom she sees only in the elevators, appear to be young and either single or childless.

Lesje would like to be out roaming the streets herself, watching. But William has suggested cribbage, which relaxes his mind.

“Fifteen two, fifteen four, fifteen six and a pair is eight,” says William. He moves his plastic toothpick. Lesje has a mere fifteen two in the crib, a pair of aces she put there herself. She shuffles and cuts, William deals. He picks up his cards and his lips purse. He’s frowning, deciding what to set aside for himself.

Lesje’s hand is so bad there’s not much choice. She permits herself a walk by moonlight, along a path trampled by the giant but herbivorous iguanodons; she can see the three-toed prints of their hind feet in the mud. She follows their trail until the trees thin and there, in the distance, is the lake, silvery, its surface broken here and there by a serpentine head, the curve of a plunging back. That she should be so privileged. How will she ever convince the others of what she has seen?

(The lake, of course, is Lake Gladys, marked clearly on the chart on page 202 of
The Lost World
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Lesje read this book at the age of ten. It was filed in the school library under Geology, and she’d been doing a project on rocks. Rocks had been her big thing before dinosaurs. Her friends at school read Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames the stewardess. Lesje hadn’t cared much for those stories. She didn’t as a rule like stories that weren’t factual. But
The Lost World
was different. They’d found a plateau in South America on which the life forms of the Upper Jurassic had continued to survive, along with other, more modern forms. She can’t remember which came first, her passion for fossils or this book; she thinks it was the book. No matter that all those on the expedition had been men. She’d fallen in love, not with Professor Challenger, the loud-mouthed assertive one, or even the young reporter or the sharpshooting English lord. It was the other one, the dry, skeptical one, the thin one; Professor Summerlee. How
many times has she stood at the edge of this lake, his thin hand in hers, while together they’ve witnessed a plesiosaur and he’s been overcome, converted at last?

She still has this book. She didn’t exactly steal it, she just forgot several times to renew it and then was so embarrassed by the librarian’s sarcasm that she lied. Lost, she said.
The Lost World
is lost.)

The lake glimmers in the moonlight. Far out, on a sandbar, a mysterious white shape flickers.

William has moved his toothpick again. She hasn’t been paying attention, he’s at least twenty points ahead of her. “Your go,” he says. Satisfaction rosies his cheeks.

“Fifteen two,” she says.

“It’s your next crib,” William says, consoling her, as he can well afford to.

The phone rings. Lesje jumps, dropping the jack of diamonds. “Could you get it, William?” she says. She suspects it’s the wrong-number man; she’s not in the mood for a monotone serenade.

“It’s for you,” William says, puzzled.

When she comes back, he says, “Who was it?”

“Elizabeth’s husband,” Lesje says.

“Who?”

“Exactly,” says Lesje. “Elizabeth’s husband Who. You’ve met him; at the Christmas party last year. You remember Elizabeth, sort of statuesque-looking; she’s the one who …”

“Oh, right,” says William. The sight of his own blood makes him queasy, so he didn’t much appreciate hearing the story of Chris, though Lesje had to tell it to him, she’d been upset. “What did he want?”

“I’m not sure,” says Lesje.

N
ate is running. His bicycle is behind him somewhere in the darkness, parked against a bench. The air is cool, strange against his new scraped face.

He runs for pleasure, taking it easy, jogging over dying grass grey in the street lights, through fallen leaves whose colors he can barely see but guesses: orange, yellow, brown. They collect the leaves in green garbage bags and truck them away now, but once they raked them into piles and burned them in the streets, the smoke rising wispy and sweetish from the centers of the mounds. He used to run with the others along the street, making sounds like a dive bomber, and then jump, clearing the mounds of leaves like hurdles. Forbidden, but if you missed it didn’t matter, the leaves were only smoldering. Men shaking rakes, telling them to bugger off.

Who did he run with, twenty or was it twenty-five years ago? Someone called Bobby, Tom something. They’re gone now, faceless; he gives them the nostalgia due to those who have died young. Casualties, though of nothing but his own memory. It’s himself, his
lace-up breeks with leather knee patches, those goddamn wool socks always falling down, mittens ice-beaded and soggy from bombarding the enemy, nose dripping over his upper lip, himself running he mourns.

And after that, no longer for pure fun, sprinting at high school and third man on the relay team, around the track with the stick he would pretend was dynamite, he had to pass it on before it exploded. He was too skinny for football then but he could run. They never won anything, though once they came second.
Mr. Clean
, they called him in the yearbook. His mother thought it was a compliment.

When he was at law school he used to come here to the same place, Queen’s Park, an oval like a track.
Queens’ park
. He remembers the jokes, the couples he really did see, in trenchcoats, wind-breakers, the casual intersections that aroused in him only a mild curiosity, a mild embarrassment. It was around that time his back started acting up and he stopped running; shortly after he met Elizabeth. An evolutionary mistake, the doctor said, meaning his height; men should have stopped at five feet. Now they were unbalanced. He told Nate that his right leg was infinitesimally shorter than his left, not uncommon in tall men, and he should wear a built-up heel. A piece of information about which Nate has done nothing. He refuses to join the ranks of the tin woodmen, those with false teeth, glass eyes, rubber breasts, orthopedic shoes. Not yet, not yet. Not before he has to.

He runs clockwise, against the traffic, the cars meeting and passing him owl-eyed, dark and sleek. Behind him are the Parliament Buildings, squat pinkish heart of a squat province. In the interior, red plush and plump as a cushion, seedy lucrative deals are no doubt being made, decisions about who will build what where, what will be torn down, who will profit. He recalls with more than discomfort, sheer disbelief, that he once thought he would go into politics. Municipal probably.
Pompous nit
. Stop the developers, save
the people; from what, for what? He was once among those who felt the universe should be just and merciful and were prepared to help it achieve this state. That was his mother’s doing. He recalls his convoluted pain, his sense of betrayal when he realized finally how impossible this was. Nineteen-seventy, civil rights abolished, a war with no invaders and no enemy and the newspapers applauding. It wasn’t the arbitrary arrests, the intimidation, the wrecking of lives that had appalled him; that was no surprise. He’d always known such things happened elsewhere, and despite the prevailing smugness he’d never doubted they could happen here. It was the newspapers applauding. Editorials, letters to the editor. The voice of the people. If that was all they had to say he’d be damned if he’d be their megaphone.

His idealism and his disillusionment now bore him about equally. His youth bores him. He used to wear a suit and listen to conversations between older men about those in power, hoping to learn something. Remembering this, he cringes; it’s like the string of love beads he wore once, briefly, when that fashion was on the wane.

Ahead of him, across the street to the left, is the Museum, illuminated now by garish orange floodlights. He used to lurk there by the doorway at closing time, hoping to catch Elizabeth on her way out. At first she’d been remote and a little condescending, as if he was some sort of perverted halfwit she was being kind to. It knocked him out; that, and the impression she gave of knowing exactly what she was doing. Lapping Queen’s Park on Saturday mornings he would think of her inside the grey buildings, sitting like a Madonna in a shrine, shedding a quiet light. Though actually she never worked on Saturdays. He would think of himself running towards her as she receded in front of him, holding a lamp in her hand like Florence Nightingale. He’s glad he never told her about this ludicrous vision. She would have laughed even then, behind his back, and brought it up later to taunt him. Chocolate box, she would have
said. The lady with the lamp. Jesus Christ. The lady with the axe, more like it. Now it’s a different figure he runs towards.

He passes the War Memorial at the apex of the park, a granite plinth featureless and without ornament, except for the Gothic wen at the top. No naked women carrying flowers, no angels, not even any skeletons. Just a signpost, a marker.
SOUTH AFRICA
, it says on the other side; he used to see that in the mornings, driving to work, before he sold the car. Before he quit. Which war? He’s never thought much about it. The only real war took place in Europe, Churchill saying they would fight on the beaches, a hot trade in chewing gum and women’s stockings, his father vanishing in a thunderclap somewhere over France. With gentle shame he recalls how he cashed in on that.
Cut it out, you guys, his dad was killed in the war
. One of the few uses for patriotism he still considers valid; and about the only use for the death of his father, whom he cannot at all remember.

He’s running south, Victoria College and St. Mike’s on his left. He’s almost around. He slows; he can feel the effort now, in his calves, his chest, the blood thudding in his head. He hasn’t breathed deeply like this for a long time. Too bad about the exhaust fumes. He should stop smoking, he should run like this every day. He should get up at six every morning, run for half an hour, cut down to a pack a day. A regular program and watch the eggs and butter. He’s not forty yet, not nearly; possibly he isn’t even thirty-five. He’s thirty-four, or was that last year? He’s always had trouble remembering the exact year of his birth. So has his mother. It’s as if they both entered into a conspiracy some time ago to pretend he wasn’t actually born, not like everyone else. Nathanael: Gift of God. His shameless mother takes care to point out this meaning. She pointed it out to Elizabeth soon after their marriage. Thanks a lot, God, Elizabeth said later, genially then. And later less genially.

He starts running harder again, sprinting towards the shadows where he’s left his bicycle. Once around. He used to be able to do this twice, he worked up to three times almost. He could do that again. On sunny days he would run watching his shadow, on the right till the Memorial, on the left coming back; a habit that started when he was on the relay team. Beat your shadow, said the coach, a Scot who taught Grade Nine English when he wasn’t teaching
P.T
.
The Thirty-nine Steps
by John Buchan. His shadow pacing him; even when there were clouds he could feel it still there. It’s here with him now, odd in the street lights so much dimmer than the sun, stretching ahead of him as he passes each light, shrinking, headless, then multiplying and leaping ahead of him again.

He never used to run at night; he doesn’t like it much. He should stop this and go home. The children will be back soon, perhaps are already back, waiting to show him their paper bags. But he keeps running, as if he must run; as if there’s something he’s running towards.

E
lizabeth sits on her mild sofa, facing the bowls. Two disembodied heads burn behind her. The bowls are on the pine sideboard. Not her own bowls, she wouldn’t let them use hers, but three bowls from the kitchen, a pyrex casserole, a white china mixing bowl, and another mixing bowl, stainless steel.

In two of the bowls are the packages the children wrapped in the afternoon, little bundles in wrinkled orange and black paper napkins, a witch and cat motif. Tied at the top with string. They wanted ribbon but there wasn’t any. In each package are some candy kisses, a miniature box of Smarties, a box of raisins. They wanted her to make gingerbread cookies with jack-o’-lantern faces on them, the way she usually did, but she said she didn’t have time this year. A lame excuse. They know how much time she spends lying in there on her bed.