Shelby (30 page)

Lucy woke me up just before noon. My jacket was still on. My back ached and my arm was numb. She made buckwheat pancakes that were heavy and filling. We giggled like Japanese exchange students seeing a cute guy in a mall. Strangely, I felt far less fearful of either the surprise communist attack or the coming apocalypse that had so haunted me only hours before. As for Lucy, a few ibuprofen tablets had eased her menstrual cramps and her head was tolerable as long as she didn't speak too loudly or move too quickly. Upon leaving, she gave me back Eric's gun.

“It wasn't loaded,” she said.

Holding it in my hand it felt unpleasant, dangerous. “Thank god,” I said, “I had it stuffed down my pants.” Lucy laughed. I felt my eyes tingle and feared tears. Lucy smiled. I thanked her for breakfast.

“I'm glad you stayed,” she said.

So was I.

XX

Blessed are the man and the woman who have grown beyond their greed, and have put an end to their hatred and no longer nourish illusions
.

—
Psalm 1, liberally

A few days later Lucy realised she was late for work and dashed away, leaving me alone in her apartment for the first time ever. Having felt more united with her than at any other time in our relationship, I was overcome with an urge to snoop through her belongings. Thankfully, decency prevailed. I did, however, flip through a photo album I stumbled upon on the top shelf of the closet in her bedroom. The majority of the photographs were of her and Frank; a particular series of them vacationing in Java affecting me most adversely. I lay back, imagining myself as the profile study on
A Current Affair: MILD MANNERED MED-SCHOOL DROPOUT OR DOCTOR OF DEATH?

Reporter: “The couple in happier times” (cut to Frank and Lucy slicing their wedding cake, swimming in paradise, et cetera), “before he came along” (black and white still of my face, sombre, eyes pained, showing signs of a thin-man's complex)
.

Me: “I'd do anything … anything … to win her love!” Macabre laugh
.

Reporter: “Even … kill?”

Me: I smirk. “She's mine, isn't she?”

Cut to weathered waitress at the Big Dipper: “Frank was never the same after she left him.”

Cut to trailer house
.

Lucy: “I don't know what to believe” (puts her arm around me as we sit on a polyester couch, her dangling left hand showing off the huge ring on her finger), “but I love my man
…”

Strangely, there was but one photograph of Lucy as a child; a small, faded black-and-white snapshot tucked away, after four blank pages, on the final page of the album. She was perhaps five or six, with bangs cut on an outrageous slant (excuse enough for her present-day temperament). She was sitting on outside steps, gently squinting into the sun, her crooked smile as delightful as ever. The moment I saw it, I was convinced getting it enlarged and framed would make the perfect Christmas gift. I removed the casing, pealed it off the sticky backing, and for safekeeping slipped it inside
T. S. Eliot: Selected Poems
, which I was carrying in my breast pocket.

The following day, December 20th, I did a one-to-five shift at Brittania Library and despite attempting to remain loving felt spiritually lost amidst Christmas decorations, kids, cakes, fruit punch and so on. Couldn't people see the gift of giving had been hunted to the brink of extinction by consumerism? Not even communication as an unconditional offering is taken at face value. And why? Because without a price tag, value is unknown to the Western boob. Where deities were once vehicles for expressing thankfulness for the gifts of existence, God is now a device for manipulating the consumer into buying bushels of dull presents. Wake up! I cried out. Unfortunately my mouth never opened save for three quick glasses of eggnog that took my bowels at gunpoint, a spasmodic reaction intensified by an awareness of two medical students at a nearby table discussing internships and billing numbers while I struggled with the Dewey decimal placement of a book called
Geraldine And The Wind Up Mouse
. In the washroom, I wrote in felt pen my first ever public graffiti:
Cover up, homeless man, in the wasted wrapping of my shiny new presents. God is yet to be found at the shoe department at Sears. Love will and must prevail. SML
.

A post-work staff Christmas gathering at Claudia-the-front-clerk's apartment was, despite good intentions, tedious. With every valueless comment, my heart sank deeper into darkness until all I could do was devour hors d'oeuvres; nachos, brownies, crab pâté and on and on. It was the punch cocktail, I believe, that led to a collage of crude thoughts bouncing around my head; nasty comments and sexual innuendo culminating in a far too real fantasy of me lying face down, naked and fully bound on the tiled floor beneath Minnie T.'s magical mass.

Fighting off the image as one would if his head were aflame I suddenly feared winding up in the back row of an adult theatre gazing at XXX-rated pornographic movies beside equally lewd, slack-jawed men whose idea of art is pumping miserable childhoods into unwashed hankies. Frazzled, I stormed from the house. My voice had to be heard, I cried to no one, and my lover had to hear it. Lucy's nonsensical denial of me was against the ways of nature, as evident in my resulting behaviour; fantasies of Minnie T., wet dreams, masturbation, the attack on Suzanne and so on. Lucy had to understand! Minutes later I was clanging on her door.

“You got my message?” she said before I had spoken.

“Lucy, I fear that if we don't compromise I'll soon be giving my pearls to pigs.”

“Did you get my message?”

“What message?”

“I left a couple on your machine.” Lucy sucked nervously on her cigarette, ashtray in hand.

“I've been at a party.”

“I quit,” she said.

“You quit?”

“Well, I was
gonna
quit. I even called the club.”

“What did they say?”

“Oh man, get this: Calvin—he's the owner—picked up the phone. I had it
all
ready. Reasons. Thank yous. Everything. Suddenly I feel like I've got piano wire around my fuckin' neck. Out of nowhere comes, ‘Can't come in, can't come in, I've got chickenpox.'
Chickenpox
!”

“Chickenpox?”

“Chickenpox. What the
hell
was I thinking? I'm already having a bitch of a time getting work in this damn town. I mean what the hell else could I do?”

“Anything!”

“Grab a brain stem.”

“You could do anything. Your life experience … your psychic readings—”

“I'm a grade nine dropout and I haven't given a decent reading in six months.”

“Your knowledge of Eastern philosophy.”

“So what?”

“Lucy, people
need
to hear what you have to say! A word from those who have lived through foster homes and the street and managed to move towards the light.”

“You're nuts.”

“I'm serious. Tell the world! Open up that window and tell the world how you did it!”

“Did what?”

“Go on!”

“Shel …”

“We'll write your biography. I'll cap every chapter with brilliant quotes in Gothic print. Robert Frost. Gerard Manley Hopkins. Christ, even—no wait, female writers only.”

“Nobody wants to hear my story.”

“Are you
mad
? Of
course
they do!”

“Are you drunk? You're acting like a fuckin' bozo.”

“Of course I'm not … oh God.”

“What?”

“I think I am.”

“Am what?”

“I think I drunk and driv—I mean drank and drove.”

“You look fine.”

“I could've killed someone.”

“How much did you drink?”

“God knows. Glass after glass.”

“Of what?”

“What am I doing? I'm supposed to be here for
you
.”

“It's okay.”

“Is the biography a possibility?”

“No.”

“What about you and me? Is there room for growth?”

“I can't talk about that right now.”

“Okay.”

“I'll think about it, all right?”

“Yes.”

She rubbed her eye with an open hand. “What am I doing?”

“Maybe you just need some time off.”

Lucy's shoulders slumped. “I'm not an accountant, for Christ's sake,” she said shakily. “I'm a stripper. Time is … you know …” She put her hands beneath her breasts. “Perky tits … it's a young gal's game, Shel, think about it.” She pulled her cigarette to her mouth and looked away.

“Where's the mystic, Shel, where's the magic? That's what I want to know. Mechtild and Hildeberg and Eckhart—they weren't survivors, they were livers—walkin' along the Rhineland, thankful in the face of hatred and fear. This city? It could take your soul at twenty paces. This world? Fuck this world.” Lucy put out her cigarette in the ashtray that was in her hand. She took a few steps into the front room, put the tray on the coffee table and lay down on the floor. I followed, lying next to her. We clasped hands. Shrouded only in darkness, it fringed the romantic.

In light of recent events, having Lucy invite me to a
special
dinner a couple days later—in which no explanation was offered beyond suggesting I dress formally—was thrilling. But to then arrive at her apartment and find her absent was disconcerting.

Hanging off the outside railing, I peered through the front room window and pounded on the glass. The only light seemed to be from the kitchen. I sensed trouble, a feeling compounded upon discovering the door was unlocked. I crept inside and called out to no answer. I ran towards the kitchen and thrust open the door. Shattered glass was scattered across the floor as steam rose up from a huge mound of rice and vegetables and Jumbo shrimp—some sort of casserole—that was splattered in front of the stove which was still open and on. The room was muggy and the windows dripped with condensation. A closer look at the mess revealed drops of blood. I yelled out and ran towards Lucy's bedroom. A crack of light under the bathroom door caught my attention. Pushing it open I found Lucy huddled against the bathtub, arms crossed in front as though trying to warm herself. She had on her stunning black evening dress. Her left hand was wrapped in a blood-stained towel and she was rocking herself to and fro.

“I cut my hand,” she said, “I cut my hand.” She reached towards me, exposing a ballooned blister across bloodied fingers. In an instant I was on the floor, my arms around her. “I cut my hand,” she said again.

“It's okay,” I said, not knowing if it was.

“My head,” she said. “All day my head wouldn't let me think and I wanted to make a special dinner for us and I couldn't see and I burnt my hand and dropped the jambalaya on the floor and the bowl smashed and I couldn't think and I tried to pick it up and I cut my hand.”

“It's all right,” I said.

“I cut my hand,” she said again.

I drove Lucy straight to St. Paul's Hospital where we sat in the emergency waiting area amidst Christmas decorations, magazines and the other Monday night injuries; two or three drunks, a woman with abdominal cramps, a limping man and his wife, the incoming stretcher brigade and a petite elderly man with streaked hair who pranced around hysterically yelling, “I've been raped! Doesn't anybody care? I've been raped!” Lucy sat beside me with her eyes closed and her head against my chest, in a mild state of shock, the blood-stained towel still wrapped around her hand. I remained placid, protective, fully embracing my role as guardian.

It was over two hours before the doctor on duty got to Lucy. He put twelve stitches in her pinky and some sort of antibiotic cleansing ointment on her burn. She hardly even flinched, and spoke nary a word on the trip home. Back at her apartment she thanked me and went directly to bed, sleeping until two the following afternoon. At that time I brought her lemon zinger tea in bed and we chatted and laughed, the mood warmed by sunlight through her window, dappling the sheets in gentle shadows. For dinner and while reading we had toast and hot chocolate in bed. It would seem to me that events had led us to a new mutual reliance in which, yes, we knew we could survive without each other, but why bother?

To my surprise, Derek telephoned me that night—he got the number from Eric—to tell me that he and Kristine had not only moved back in together but that I was seven and a half months from unclehood! My joy was unbridled. Deduction revealed the infant to have been conceived in Revelstoke during the time of Gran's funeral—evidently willed by her spirit. I was the only person he'd told, and I was not to mention it to Mom or Dad. Lucy's enthusiasm was wonderful. Later I demanded she join my family for Christmas in Revelstoke with all the traditional trimmings; chestnuts, stockings, turkey. She declined without hesitation.

The following day I left Lucy's apartment two full hours before my shift in order to explore toy stores for Junior. Lucy, bless her, remained in bed, a migraine now added to her blistered hand. Beyond cooking and comforting, there was unfortunately little I could do for her. Nonetheless, with taking care of her, talk of children and the notion of family togetherness being a theme still visible beneath frenzied Christmas consumerism, I could not help but occasionally imagine us married.

Outside, I was unbothered by the falling rain, mesmerized instead by a mother carrying a heap of presents while waiting at the bus stop on the corner of Yew Street and Cornwall with her two young children in tow. We shared a smile as I took a portion of the bench. I figured one of the children to be newly born (although he was so swaddled in a snugly I couldn't even see him. Does life, I wondered, ever get better than that?). The other was a handsome boy, maybe three, with a mop of dark hair and blue eyes, stepping in puddles with his gumboots and tiny legs that
grow
, gazing all about, babbling to the passing cars, at ease with the rain and with himself—still years from hating his body and the rest of the world. The mother glanced at me and smiled when one of his stomps splattered a spray of dirty water just far enough to catch the cuff of my corduroys.