Life Before Man (8 page)

She’d told her roommate, who was a social historian with tinted granny glasses, that she didn’t really have time for the group, as her palynology course was heavier than she’d thought. Neither of them believed this, and shortly afterwards Lesje moved into a single apartment. She couldn’t stand the constant attempts to engage her in meaningful dialogue while she was eating her corn flakes or drying her hair. At that time nuances had bothered her; she was much happier among concrete things. Now she feels it might have been useful to have listened more carefully.

Nate hasn’t yet frightened her by asking her to tell him about herself, though he’s been talking since they sat down. She ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, a grilled cheese sandwich and a
glass of milk. She listens, eating in small bites, concealing her teeth. Nate has given no hint yet as to why he called her. At the time she thought it might be because she’d known Chris, she knew Elizabeth, and he needed to talk about it. She could understand that. But so far he hasn’t mentioned either of them.

Lesje can’t see how he can get through a conversation, even five minutes of one, without mentioning an event that to her would have loomed very large in the foreground. If it were her life, which it isn’t. Until this lunch, this grilled cheese sandwich and – what is he eating? – a hot turkey sandwich on white bread, she thought about Nate, if at all, simply as the least interesting figure in that tragic triangle.

Elizabeth, who stalks about the Museum these days white-skinned, eyes black-shadowed, a little too plump to carry it off entirely but otherwise like some bereft queen out of a Shakespearean play, is of course the most interesting. Chris is interesting because he is dead. Lesje knew him, but not very well. Some people at work found him remote, others too intense. He was rumored to have a ferocious temper, but Lesje never saw it. She worked on only one project with him: Smaller Mammals of the Mesozoic. It’s finished now, installed in its glass case with push buttons wired for the voices. Lesje did the specifications and Chris built the models, using muskrat fur and rabbit and woodchuck, doctored, to cover the wooden forms. She used to visit him in that shadowy workroom, at one end of the corridor where they kept the stuffed owls and the other large birds. Specimens, two of each kind, in little pull-out metal drawers, like an animal morgue. She would bring coffee for both of them and drink hers while he worked, putting the shapes together with wood and Styrofoam. They guessed together about certain details: eyes, colors. It was odd, watching such a massive man concentrate himself on meticulous details. Chris wasn’t unusually tall; he wasn’t even overly muscular. But he gave an impression of
mass, as though he would weigh more than anyone else the same size, as if his cells were closer together, squeezed inward by some irresistible gravitational force. Lesje never thought about whether she liked him or not. You don’t like or dislike a boulder.

Now he’s dead and therefore immediately more remote, more mysterious. His death baffles her: she can’t imagine ever doing anything like that herself, and she can’t imagine anyone she knows doing it. Chris seemed like the last person who would. To her at any rate. Though people aren’t her field, so she’s no judge.

But Nate; she hasn’t thought much about Nate. He doesn’t look like a betrayed husband. Right now he’s talking about the election in Quebec, which is taking place at this very moment. He bites into a piece of turkey, chews; gravy traces his chin. The Separatists, he feels, ought to win, because the other government is so corrupt. Also because of the notorious behavior of the Federal Government in 1970. Lesje vaguely remembers that some people were arrested, after the kidnappings. She was working very hard on her Invertebrates course at the time; fourth year, and every mark counted.

Does he think it would be a good thing in the long run? Lesje asks. That isn’t the point, Nate says. The point is a moral one.

If William had said this Lesje would have found it pompous. She doesn’t find it pompous now. Nate’s long face (surely he used to have a beard; she recalls a beard, at parties and when he’d come with his children to pick Elizabeth up after work; but the face is hairless, pale), his body hanging from his shoulders like a suit from a hanger, nonchalant, impresses her. He’s older, he must know things, things she can only guess at; he must have accumulated wisdom. His body would be wrinkled, his face has bones. Unlike William’s. William has put on weight since they’ve been living together; his bones are retreating back into his head, behind the soft barricades of his cheeks.

William is against the Parti Québécois because of their wish to flood James Bay and sell the electrical power.

“But the other side is doing that, too,” Lesje said.

“If I lived there I wouldn’t vote for either of them,” William said purely.

Lesje herself doesn’t know how she would vote. She thinks she would probably move, instead. Nationalism of any kind makes her uneasy. In her parents’ house it was a forbidden subject. How could it be otherwise, with the grandmothers both lurking, questioning her separately, waiting to pounce? They’d never met. Both had refused to go to her parents’ wedding, which had been a civil ceremony. But the grandmothers had focused their rage not on their offending children but on each other. As for her, they’d both loved her, she supposes; and both had mourned over her as if she were in some way dead. It was her damaged gene pool. Impure, impure. Each thought she should scrap half her chromosomes, repair herself, by some miracle. Her Ukrainian grandmother, standing in the kitchen behind Lesje while she sat in a chrome and plastic chair reading
The Young People’s Book of Stalactites and Stalagmites
, brushing her hair, talking to her mother in a language she didn’t understand. Brushing and weeping silently.

“Mum, what’s she saying?”

“She says your hair is very black.”

The Ukrainian grandmother bending to hug her, consoling her for a pain Lesje didn’t yet know she had. She’d been given an egg once by the Ukrainian grandmother, one of the untouchable decorated eggs kept on the mantelpiece along with the family photos in silver-plated frames. The Jewish grandmother, finding it, had smashed the egg with her tiny boots, stamping up and down, a mouse’s rage.

They’re both old women, her mother said. They’ve had hard
lives. You can’t change anyone over fifty. Lesje wept over her handful of bright egg fragments while her little grandmother, repentant, stroked her with her brown paws. She bought Lesje another egg, somewhere; which must have cost her more than the money.

Both grandmothers spoke as if they personally had been through the war, had been gassed, raped, run through with bayonets, shot, starved, bombed and cremated, and had by a miracle survived; which wasn’t true. The only one who had actually been there was Aunt Rachel, her father’s sister, older by twenty years, already married and settled by the time the family left. Aunt Rachel was a photograph on her grandmother’s mantelpiece, a plump dumpy-looking woman. She’d been comfortably off, and that was all the picture revealed: comfort. No foreknowledge; that was added much later, by Lesje, guiltily looking. Her father and mother did not discuss Aunt Rachel. What was there to discuss? No one knew what had happened to her. Lesje, although she has tried, cannot imagine her.

Lesje does not say any of this to Nate, who’s explaining to her why the French feel the way they feel. Lesje doesn’t really care why. She just wants to stay out of the way.

Nate has almost finished his turkey sandwich; he hasn’t eaten any of his fries. He’s gazing at the table to the left of Lesje’s water glass, picking apart one of the Varsity Restaurant’s white rolls. His place is scattered with crumbs. Things have to be viewed in a historical context, he says. He abandons the roll and lights a cigarette. Lesje doesn’t like to ask for one – hers are gone, and it’s the wrong time to get up for more – but after a minute he offers her one and even lights it for her, staring at her nose, she feels, which makes her nervous.

She wants to ask: Why am I here? You didn’t really invite me to lunch in this third-rate restaurant to settle the future of the nation, did you? But he’s already signaling for the bill. As they wait for it,
he tells her he has two daughters. He says their names and ages, then repeats them, as though reminding himself or making sure she’s got it straight. He’d like to bring them to the Museum some Saturday, he says. They’re very interested in dinosaurs. Could she perhaps show them around?

Lesje doesn’t usually work on Saturdays, but how can she say no? Depriving his children of dinosaurs. She ought to be glad for the chance to spread the word, make converts, but she isn’t: dinosaurs aren’t a religion for her, only a preserve. Also she’s oddly disappointed. There should have been more to it, after all that stuttering on the telephone, this assignation at a restaurant which, she suddenly realizes, Elizabeth can be depended on never to enter. Lesje says politely that she’d be more than delighted to walk Nate’s children through the exhibits and answer any questions they might have. She starts to put on her coat.

Nate pays for the lunch, even though Lesje offers to pick up her half. She would rather pay for the whole lunch. He looks so broke. More importantly, it’s still not at all clear to her what will be expected of her for this gift of a grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of milk; what she is being asked to do or give in return.

N
ate sits in the Selby Hotel, drinking draft beer and watching television.
TRANSIENT, PERMANENT
, the sign in the entranceway reads, in big type, as if the two things are the same. Once it was an old man’s bar, a bar for poor old men. He drinks at the Selby out of habit: Martha’s place is only three blocks away, and he’d fallen into the pattern of dropping in for a few beers either before seeing her or, if it was still early enough, after leaving. He hasn’t yet chosen a new bar.

He’ll have to soon: the Selby, which when he started to drink there was full of anonymous faces, is beginning to clog with people he knows. They aren’t friends exactly and he knows them only because they all drink here. Still, he’s become a regular, and many of the old regulars are gone. Workers from Cabbagetown, frayed, silent for the most part, mutterers of dependably gloomy rote phrases. Now the place is being taken over by the same people who are taking over the mews flats and back alleys of Cabbagetown. Photographers, men who say they’re writing a book. They talk too much, are too cheerful, invite him to sit at their tables when he
doesn’t want to. He has some standing among them, a woodcarver, worker with his hands, artisan, the man with the knife. He prefers bars where he’s the first of his kind.

The bar he’ll look for will be sober, quiet, devoid of pinball machines and jukeboxes and pimply eighteen-year-olds who drink too much and throw up in the can. He wants a bar half full of men in zip-front jackets and open-necked shirts with the T-shirt collar showing, slow and steady drinkers; serious television-watchers like himself. He likes to tune in on the national news and then get the sports scores.

He can hardly do this in his own house, as Elizabeth has long since exiled his ancient portable black and white set from the living room, where she said it was out of place, then from the kitchen. She said she couldn’t stand to have it blaring while she cooked and he could decide whether he wanted to watch television or eat, because if it was television she would go out for dinner and let him fend for himself. That was in the olden days, before Nate of necessity began to cook. He tried sneaking the set into the bedroom – he had visions of lying in bed watching the late movie, a Scotch and water in one hand, Elizabeth curled cosily beside him – but that didn’t last a night.

The set ended up in Janet’s room, where the children watch Saturday morning cartoons on it. When he moved into his own room he didn’t have the heart to take it away from them again. Sometimes he watches it with them or sits in their room by himself during afternoon football games. But they’re always asleep by the time the eleven o’clock news comes on. He could always watch it at his mother’s, she never misses a night, but it’s too far to go and she doesn’t keep beer in the house. She wouldn’t be too excited about this kind of thing anyway. Earthquakes, famines, that’s different. Every time there’s a famine on the news, Nate can predict his mother will be on the phone the next day, trying to bully him
into adopting an orphan or selling Pieces for Peace to his toy retailers. Bits of colored wool made into gnomes, folded paper birds. “Christmas tree decorations aren’t going to save the world,” he tells her. Then she says she hopes the children are taking their cod liver oil pills every morning. She suspects Elizabeth of vitamin deficiencies.

Elizabeth, on the other hand, has no interest in watching any sort of news whatsoever. She hardly even reads the papers. Nate has never known anyone with as little interest in the news as Elizabeth.

Tonight, for instance, she went to bed at seven; she didn’t even bother to stay up for the election results. Nate, watching everything fall apart up there on the screen, can’t understand her indifference. This is an event of national and perhaps even international importance, and she’s sleeping through it! The special crew of commentators can hardly contain themselves, one way or another. The Quebeckers on the panel are trying hard to keep from grinning; they’re supposed to be objective, but their faces twitch every time the computer flashes a new victory for the Parti Québécois. The English on the other hand are about to wet themselves. René Lévesque can hardly believe it; he looks as if someone has simultaneously kissed him and kneed him in the groin.

The cameras cut back and forth between the thin-lipped commentators and the crowds at PQ headquarters, where a wild celebration is going on. Dancing in the streets, jubilant outbursts of song. He tries to remember a similar kind of celebration on his side of the border, but the only thing he can think of is the first Russian-Canadian hockey series, when Paul Henderson scored the winning goal. Men hugged each other and the drunker ones cried. But this is no hockey game. Watching the discomfiture of the defeated Liberals, the stiff upper lips of the English newsmen, Nate grins.
Serves them fucking well right
. This is his own personal vengeance on all the writers of letters to the editors across the country.
Repression begets revolution, he thinks, all you stockbrokers.
So eat shit
. Merely a quote from the Prime Minister, he’d say to the old ladies, if that was him up there on the screen.