Losing It (36 page)

“What are you doing?” Bob said. Julia shook Matthew until he woke up. A car behind her honked so she started them forward again. Matthew began once more to cry. “It’s all right. He’s fine,” Bob said, gently, putting his hand behind Julia’s neck. “We got away with it.”

It was an odd thing to say, but she knew what he meant. It could’ve been much worse. They could’ve all been killed, or burned badly. It was a miracle they weren’t. They were lucky, or someone was watching over them, even while she couldn’t watch over her mother. She was too tired, she didn’t deserve to have a child, she couldn’t handle the responsibility. But she’d gotten away with it. The house was ruined but at least the family was still intact.

She drove them to the Chateau Laurier, beside the Parliament Buildings. It wouldn’t be the cheapest hotel – was probably the most expensive, actually – and Julia didn’t know what the insurance would cover, hadn’t even contacted the agent – all the papers were in Bob’s study, probably incinerated. She didn’t want to think about it. Tomorrow. A hundred thousand details for tomorrow. For tonight they could afford some luxury, they needed it, deserved it after what they’d been through, and she simply decided for them without discussion. In this Bob seemed content to follow along. He looked so odd in the clothes that their neighbour Ray had been able to scrounge up for him: pants quite tight and a little long, a turtleneck that stretched badly over Bob’s middle, an old, battered blue Toronto Maple Leafs hockey jacket, and Bob’s own rubber gardening boots that he’d managed to find in the basement in his scramble to get out. He was and he wasn’t Bob, at the same time.

Julia parked in the underground lot, then they walked out the vehicle entrance to Wellington Street, which looked shabby in the night, a number of lanes shut down by unending construction. The front steps and doorway of the green-towered, castle-like hotel, however, were a fairy tale of red carpeting, gleaming marble, polished brass, and the lobby was cavernous, the walls and ceiling crowded with ornate carvings. It had been years since Julia had been there – her father would meet her there for lunch sometimes when she was a teenager. She was immersed suddenly in the memory: her father so much older than most of her friends’ fathers, and yet dapper in his suit, his hair so short and neat. He would hurry in from some office tangle and then relax, soak in the slow, measured, aristocratic tread of the place. She remembered the soft bright-white linen napkins and tablecloths, how beautifully ironed they were, not starched and stiff but possessed of a certain firmness anyway, a sense of decorum. She remembered the heavy silver cutlery and the delicate teacups, and her father downing that first drink, the tension draining from his face. His refuge. How silent he was at home, withdrawn. But here he was just as likely to open with a question debating the course of history – “What if Truman hadn’t dropped the bomb?” – as he was to bear down and say, “I don’t want you to rush into marriage. You need to wait, establish yourself, figure out who you are on your own terms.” Julia all of fifteen, feeling galaxies away from getting married.

“So you don’t want me to be like Mom?” she’d joked once, and she remembered the way the old man’s eyes narrowed, his teeth chewing on the inside of his cheek.

“I will not a hear a word against your mother. Not from you. Not from anybody.” And how quickly the gravity of the moment had changed, Julia’s juvenile attempt at humour buried beneath the earthen weight of her father’s will and conflicted emotions.

“Just not rush into marriage,” she’d said after a terrible awkwardness, and how grudgingly he seemed to accept the attempt to recover.

“Exactly. Because they’re going to come knocking, you’ll see. They’re going to be lining up three deep.” This small, tough, steady-eyed, balding man, her father in his business suit, soberly settled into drink, trying to tell her, to get something into her pretty head.

Now Julia stared at the huge marble statue of near-naked cherubs that dominated the hotel lobby. The one on top was reaching up, drinking from some sort of conch shell, while the one below knelt on a nasty-looking fish – all teeth and smiles, like a sea monster from a centuries-old map.

Julia asked Bob to sign them in but he didn’t even have his wallet! He stood in front of the check-in counter patting his pockets in a helpless fog. People in the lobby were looking at him, his odd clothes.

“Do you have your cards?” he asked. His eyes were glazed.

“No,” she said. Her purse was gone, like everything. If she hadn’t had her keys in her pocket, they wouldn’t even have been able to get out of the driveway.

“What should we do?” he asked. He stood very still, waited like a child for her to find the solution. Julia looked at the impeccable young woman behind the counter who seemed to embody a world where not having money was never an issue.

“I left a spare card in the glove compartment!” Julia announced, and waited for a spark of something in Bob’s eyes: Reproach? Relief? How many times had he told her it was just asking to be stolen if left there? And what if she’d followed his advice? But there was a dull nothing in his gaze.

“What’s wrong with you?” she whispered, but received only a look of surprise, as if she were the one acting strangely.

Julia explained to the desk clerk about the fire and their situation, handed Matthew over to Bob, then returned to the parking garage and retrieved the credit card. When she brought it to the desk everything was fine. The clerk put together a courtesy kit for them with toothbrushes, toothpaste, razors, combs, spare diapers for Matthew.

It was going to be all right. Hard to think otherwise in the stately surroundings, the acres of soft carpet, the old, moneyed gleam of the place, the elegant displays of Inuit carvings, of large oil paintings for sale at undisclosed prices. Even the elevator had the comforting, substantial feel of confident wealth: the dark-brown wood interior, the small, tasteful, gleaming crystal light fixture above their heads. She felt as if she were slowly emerging into daylight. Then, while being lifted so smoothly she could barely register the motion, the slumping, exhausted Matthew now back in her arms, she suddenly said, “Bob, your car!”

He looked at her, startled. “What?”

“Your car! I didn’t see it in the driveway. That’s why I was sure you weren’t in the house, your car wasn’t there when we got out.”

“Oh,” Bob said, and looked down suddenly, then looked up again. “Well, my car,” he said.

“Do you think somebody stole it? My God, what
else
could go wrong?”

“Oh no, no,” Bob said quickly. “No. It isn’t that.” But he didn’t say what it was. He looked instead at the lighted numbers above the elevator door.

“What was it then?” Julia asked. She felt almost as if she were talking to her mother. She wasn’t sure he understood what she’d said. She felt her anger rising, found herself looking down to keep from lashing out at him.

The elevator doors opened, they walked out into a wide, chandelier-lit corridor. Bob strode ahead, missed the sign that pointed the correct direction to their room. Julia told him but he didn’t seem to hear – he walked all the way down the hall, then returned and walked past her, finally found the right door.

The room was expansive, high-ceilinged, dominated by two large beds, but with many fine touches that Julia forced herself to appreciate: the warm rust-coloured carpet and peach walls, the colour of both picked up in an understated, single dark strand of the ceiling moulding; the elegant curtains decorated with wildflowers on a sepia background; the two splendid pictures of ancient globes with antique gold-coloured frames; the marvellous wall mirror also framed in antique gold. And, most glorious of all, real windows that actually opened. Julia threw them open, but the view was disappointing: gnarled, tortured Wellington Street, past the Conference and Arts Centres, with the Rideau Canal splitting them, the white lamp globes now looking like touristy gimcracks. The sound of traffic spilled in and she closed the windows reluctantly, laid the exhausted Matthew on the nearest bed, changed him, then tucked him under the blanket. He seemed tiny, extraordinarily fragile, was sleeping like an angel.

“So,” Julia said, “what about the car?”

“Uh, the car,” Bob said, as if he’d forgotten most of the conversation.

“It wasn’t stolen,” she said.

“No. Oh no,” he said. “I lent it to a friend. To one of the students, actually, who is moving.”

“You lent your Porsche to a student who’s moving?” Julia said. Bob wouldn’t even let her put a potted plant in his precious car, he thought it might stain the seats.

“Special circumstance,” Bob said quickly. “His name is, uh,
Boyd, Dennis Boyd. His mother was killed in an accident recently, and he needs help …”

“He’s
your
student?” Julia said. “I read about that accident. Just awful. A drunk driver in a panel van. Wasn’t the boy’s name Clarence? And I thought it was the father who was killed. I didn’t know he was your student.”

“Yes. Yes,” Bob said vaguely. “Anyway, he drove me home, and he’s just using it for tonight.”

“Do you want to call him?” Julia asked. “He’ll drop it off and find that the house is -”

“No. It doesn’t matter,” Bob said.

“But he’s going to be wondering -”

“I told him to keep it till tomorrow,” he said. “Anyway, I can’t face people tonight, too much has happened.” He was standing by himself in the middle of the room, terribly still and alone, in his ridiculous borrowed clothes, looking at her with such sudden longing – artless, helpless, almost childlike in his need and want. She felt her anger subsiding, which she fought against.

“You’ve been drinking today,” she said, her voice having more edge than she’d wanted, but there it was, she was upset, she couldn’t disguise it.

“For God’s sake -” he started.

“The faculty lounge?” she said. “You came back completely smashed. You must have. I was
exhausted
. I was dead on my feet. I just went to close my eyes for a few minutes -”

“Julia.”

“But you! You probably could have stopped her if you hadn’t been so out of it. You could have called up to me -”

“Listen -”

“Don’t you understand how I feel? Our house has been destroyed, I’ve had to take my mother back to Fallowfields, the
one place I never wanted to put her again. And you, you’ve been acting like -”

“Let’s not do this now,” he said.

“When do you want to do it!” she screamed and Matthew awoke.

“Not now. Not now,” he said, his head bowed, as if too heavy to hold up.

She went to her son, comforted him, rocked him against her breast until he was calm and sleepy again. Bob stayed where he was, a mournful statue in the middle of the room, facing the wrong direction.

She put Matthew back in his bed, walked into the bathroom and shut the door. The house burned down, she thought. The one time I close my eyes.

“I’m sorry,” came Bob’s voice from outside the door. “Let’s not fight.”

She ran the cold water in the sink, splashed her face. If he said anything, she couldn’t hear it. She kept the water running while she dried herself with a towel. When she finally shut off the faucet he waited a breath or two. “Let’s not fight,” he said again, almost a whisper. “It’s a disaster. We need each other. This isn’t the time to fight.”

She found herself shedding her clothes, stepping into the chilly, austere, old-fashioned tub, running the water full blast. Her feet felt oddly numb, cold from the night, not yet used to the heat of the water. In a minute. She adjusted the taps, had a hard time finding the right temperature. When the tub was full she shut everything off and lay back in the silence, her ears under water, her head at an uncomfortable angle because of the steep slope of the tub. Was he still hovering outside the door?

She thought of her mother screaming in the Fallowfields lobby, hair wild, the anguish on her face. She remembered
holding the pen with too much force, signing so violently that she couldn’t recognize her own signature.

“You have a drinking problem,” she said, and lifted her ears out of the water, adjusted her posture to a slightly less awkward position. “We never talk about it. This would be a good time.”

Silence.

“You spend too many afternoons boozing in the faculty lounge. I smell it on you a lot. How am I supposed to trust you to look after Matthew when you can be like this? You probably could have stopped my mother but you were too drunk to notice. It might be you someday out of control on the highway smashing into someone’s parent. Did you ever think of that?”

No answer. She submerged again, wet her hair completely, then sat up and scrubbed her face and body with hotel soap. How many times had her mother screamed at her father about his drinking? How many times did Julia swear she would never be in that same position?

Bob mumbled something outside the door.

“What?”

“You’re right,” he said simply.

“What?”

“You’re right. You’re absolutely right. I had too much to drink. I will never drink again in my life.”

“Fuck off,” she said.

“I’m not being facetious! You’re absolutely right. I had too much to drink, I wasn’t alert when I got home, you were exhausted, we could’ve all been killed. I will never drink again. I swear it absolutely.”

Julia didn’t comment. She pulled the plug, stepped out and dripped onto the bath mat, wrapped herself in thick, warm towels. She didn’t want to go out. But she wasn’t going to spend the night in the bathroom either.

When she opened the door he was standing inches away. He looked utterly ridiculous, still in his silly Leafs jacket. She pressed forward, eyes down, had to pause and press forward again before he got out of the way. She grabbed the bag of extra supplies from the dressing table, returned to the bathroom and brushed her teeth. Then she snapped off the bathroom light and the main light as well, plunging the room into darkness. In a few seconds she was between the sheets, towels discarded on the floor, thinking, Just try it. Just try getting into bed with me tonight.

She could hear him moving about the room, starting this way, going another, as if unable to decide what to do. Her eyes were clamped shut, she held her body as still as possible. She heard him sit down on the edge of Matthew’s bed then move off. For a while she couldn’t hear him at all, wondered if he had slipped out the door somehow. But there he was on the edge of her bed now, a voice in the darkness.