Shelby (35 page)

“I know,” she said.

“No bed.”

“It doesn't matter.” She unzipped her suitcase and took out two sweaters, laying them side by side on the floor. “Pillows,” she said softly, almost to herself. She stood up and looked at me as though too fatigued to smile or cry. She turned out the light. Our hands touched and together we crumpled to the floor and into each others arms. Pulling the quilt over us, she buried herself into me, her face resting on my upper chest like a captured wild animal finally giving in to undeniable exhaustion; her legs and arms like adjustable clamps around my body, holding on like a parachuter fearful of jumping. I was in shock.

I woke up in the night to the hum of life and Lucy's breathing. I was sweaty and my left arm and leg were numb, crushed between Lucy and the hardwood floor. An attempt to stretch was met with resistance; Lucy gripping on like a child afraid of darkness, afraid of dying, afraid of disappearing—or maybe that was me. Outside was darkness. Gently I pulled away, flexing until circulation recurred. I caressed the side of her face with my hand, then her hair, and pictured this madwoman, my lover, strolling along the Rhine river, draped in rags, flowers in matted hair, chanting Gregorian hymns from the Middle Ages. Suddenly she started to breathe very rapidly. I lowered my lips like rose petals upon her cheek, slowing down her panic without waking her up. That was all I knew. I closed my eyes, dreaming of love—for me, for Lucy—coasting over us like the night.

We woke up simultaneously, before us the soft, hopeful glow of morning. Neither of us moved. We just looked. Lucy put her hand on the back of my head and pulled me in close until our noses touched. She kissed me and smiled, her breath warm. I leaned my cheek on hers and closed my eyes.

“Hello,” I whispered.

She placed her hand softly on my cheek and left it there, saying nothing.

“You're going, aren't you?” I asked.

I felt her nod. We lay awhile longer. I opened my eyes.

“How are you getting to Seattle?”

“I'm flying,” she said softly.

“What time?”

“Three-thirty.”

I phoned the library and left a message on the personnel answering machine saying I wouldn't be in because of a family emergency.

“Does that make me family?”

“Only if you stay,” I said.

“I can't, Shel.”

“I want you to know you've really gone and blown all my plans.”

“What plans?”

“I'm not sure, but I know you were in them.”

Lucy closed her eyes, touching her fingers to my cheek.

“Lucy … I have to tell you something. You have to stay.”

“I can't.”

“You
have
to.”

“I
can't
.”

“I … I have cancer.”

“
What
?”

“That's a lie … but
please
stay …”

Lucy laughed.

“
See
? That's the kind of fun we could have if you stayed.”

“Fun?” she said grinning. “I need turmoil.”

“Why do you have to go away?”

Lying on her side, she shrugged her shoulders. “I just know I have to.”

“But … isn't it … I think it's good here, you know?”

“It's not that, Shel,” she said. “It's just that … I've never actually been anywhere where it felt like it was where it should be. I've always felt like either I'm in the wrong place or the place is in the wrong place.”

“And Nazi Germany is the answer?”

“I'm going everywhere.”

“I don't think going away is the answer. You can't just walk into the Amazon River and say, ‘Hi, I'm here, I'm your new Goddess.'”

“I can't?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Well … because … well …”

We both laughed.

“I'll be hittin' the Rhine first, anyway,” she said, “then maybe the Nile. Rumour has it the Amazon's crazy with wannabe Goddesses this time of year.”

“Hey? Why don't I come with you? I have no immediate plans. I could probably hear my calling in India just as well as Vancouver—maybe better.”

Lucy closed her eyes and touched two fingers from her right hand to my lips. Her eyes opened. “I'm going on my own,” she said.

“Lucy, if you can't find yourself here, I don't think you're going to be able to do it anywhere else.”

“Maybe.”

“Wait,” I said, “you can't go. I still owe you a thousand dollars!”

“A gift.”

“
What
?”

“It's yours.”

“I can't take it.”

“Too late.”

“What are you going to live on?”

“I've been stripping for eight years, Shel,” she said. “I've saved a bushel of money—stashes of it everywhere.” She grinned. “Accounts all over the world. Even with Frankie-boy I saved a fair chunk of dough.”

“Lucy, I have to pay you back.”

“Look, keep me in my old age.”

We stared at each other.

“I would,” I said.

“Thanks, Shel.”

“In fact it was one of my plans.”

Just before leaving for the airport, Lucy bestowed on me a cardboard box full of things she wanted me to have, books—
The Flowing Light of the Godhead, Myths to Live By, Original Blessing, The Family, Tao Te Ching, The Book, The Transmission of Doubt, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware
, candles—purple, blue, red, some half melted, some new, the poem she had hung and framed inside the door:
The valley spirit never dies; It is the woman, primal mother
…, a small stack of photographs, a pipe, a record—
The Best of Dave Brubeck
, two bracelets and a worn out Raggedy-Ann type doll with a few strands of orange hair, a loose leg and one of her teeth blacked out with blue ink.

Stepping outside, the street—our street—was amazingly quiet; it was chilly, an overcast sky hanging with the threat of rain. I put the cardboard box, the quilt and Lucy's suitcase in the back seat of the car. Lucy put her other bag on her lap. And so I drove, due south, overwhelmed; two days earlier I had been seeking ways to bridge the gap between us, confident, yearnful, unknowing that a finger snap into the future I'd be driving her to the airport so she could venture off on a spiritual safari to someplace called Bingen.

Boom
and we were standing at the departure gate watching faceless passengers walk through the metal detector, all of them oblivious to the significance of our situation. Nonetheless, there we were, the gestation period of our relationship about to come to term, only to have us separated at birth. The last call for boarding had come and gone.

“This is it,” she said. I glanced at Lucy. She appeared anxious.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

She turned and looked at me as though about to burst. “I think so,” she said, half smiling. I was overtaken by a wave of sadness, without warning, rising like a storm front. I turned away and looked out towards the landed planes. A few snow-flakes fell. Lucy took my hand and squeezed it softly. My eyes trickled with moistness. I swallowed and took a deep breath. Several more people went through the detector. Lucy squeezed my hand a second time.

“Well, I guess this is it,” she said. She threw her arms around me, stroking the back of my neck with her bandaged hand. I closed my eyes, trying to memorize the feeling. Lucy fell away, looking up at me. For the first time ever I saw tears in her eyes. She quickly rubbed them with the wrist of her bandaged hand. “Damn allergies,” she said.

“Do me a favour,” I said, “learn whatever it is you have to learn and then get the hell back here.” Tears were starting to roll down my face.

“Okay.” There were no more people going through. “I have to go,” she said. She hugged me again and turned away, putting her carry on bag on the conveyor belt.

“Wait!” she yelled, snatching it back. The customs lady jumped away. Lucy crouched down, unzipped the bag and pulled out the framed photograph of the little girl I'd given her for Christmas. She ran back and handed it to me, her eyes alive with tears and sadness and hope. “It's me,” she said.

I looked at the photograph. “Really?”

“Nineteen sixty-five,” she said. “Nothing but fear. Thanks for everything, Shel.” Tears everywhere, she smiled. I smiled back and looked down at the little girl with the bad haircut, eyes squinting into the sun.

I looked up.

The big girl was gone.

XXIII

O powerless is the brain to pierce this mighty mystery!

—
Walt Whitman

I didn't do the concert with Eric that night. I left the airport and drove to the banks of the Fraser River. Pulling Lucy's quilt from the back seat, I draped it over myself and watched the water flow by; pregnant from all the rain, muddy and brown against the light fall of snow, clouds above her reminiscent of sleeping old dogs, factories and the squeals of rush hour traffic dancing around her like a huge golden frame from the Smithsonian Museum in Oxford or some other place I'd never been. Pollution on the shoreline told a tale of its own: a licence plate, two aluminum cans and a plastic bag. Gazing out to the other side and as far east and west as vision would allow, I could see no Goddess.

I watched the river until long after the sun had disappeared, changes abounding, light to dark, altering noises, all of it dished up like soup, rolled out like carpet, unstoppable, source unclear, destination blurry. And then I drove across town, still draped in the quilt, and parked the car outside Lucy's apartment. I knew I hadn't yet grasped the reality of her leaving—whatever that was. I half expected to see her in the window, or dancing, or yelling, or smiling.

In the lamplight I flicked through the books she had left me in her box. In one by some guy named Bubba Free John—poor kid—there was a bright red bookmark with a tassle. I opened to that page and read what had been highlighted in yellow felt pen, presumably by Lucy:

Rather than settling down to an adolescent life of complaint, you should kick your ass out of the house and submit yourself to the bare facts of existence. Wander until you find it. This was an obvious course for me. There was no way I was just going to take a profession or a job and settle down to a middle-class life. To do so was insane from my point of view. I did not see any Happy people. I only saw people burdened with their lifetime occupation, their dumb ideas about existence, and their endless neurotic fretting. What is the purpose of organizing that into a career? What is the purpose of devoting yourself to a life of preserving that?

I couldn't decide if the passage had been highlighted as a way for Lucy to explain to me her leaving, as a piece of prose that moved her, or as a note for me to reflect on. Either way, I read it several times. I cried, too. I stared at her window for hours; the darkness of glass, the emptiness of a memory of a calico cat. And sometime into the wee morning hours I unravelled myself from the quilt, wandered shivering down to the beach and peed into the ocean. At that moment it seemed, with a golden umbilical chord glistening between us, I and the sea were one; and as I breathed out visible breath I thought, where does this breath end? Where does the air I take in end?

Dawn arrived in a downpour, a cacophony of natural applause, and to this curtain call I did a U-turn on Cornwall Street and parked in the beach parking lot perhaps 100 feet away. Traffic peaked to where its roar—beeps and squeals and all—was indecipherable from the crash of rain. Tilting my seat back, I was swaddled in the quilt, my thoughts as intermingled as Christmas decorations, lights included, after a year in storage.

Save a late lunch across the street at
Mama Gold's
, I remained in the car for the day, wrapped and warm in Lucy's quilt, my sunroof mysteriously not leaking. I thought about the Neo-nazi groups that had spread across the Canadian horizon in the past year or so and the anti-rascist groups that had sprouted up in defence with large rallys and signs like KILL NAZIS. Naturally I took side with the latter group, but were either of them doing any good? The same went for the Pro-Life and Pro-Choice factions. The end result? Individual human ideologies and angers so ingrained that on a large scale differing opinions—indeed
people
—seem incapable of one thing: getting together and chatting it out—or just getting together!
Are
Pro-Choicers really murderers? Does the conscious aborting of a fetus hint towards a human species' subconscious hatred for existence? Is it a feminist reaction to subjugation? As for Pro-lifers, the majority of them also believe that capital punishment is warranted and killing in war is justified. Therefore, I concluded, in the depths of what we call civilization, psychosis abounds. And religion? Jesus appeared to be onto something with his
Do not judge
concept, but look what happened. Moreover, now He has a group of fifty million
ardent
followers in North America who, I am sure, if it weren't for the grace of the times would slaughter homosexuals and wipe out nonbelievers. In short, be it nations or lovers, eventually somebody always stops calling. Perhaps the answer for me was to take no sides and have no opinions. But then how could I still enjoy poetry? Or was the answer to not follow anybody,
including
myself? Dammit, who could I turn to? Lucy had the Goddess, but that for me was not a natural inclination. But what was? What had I accomplished in my twenty years? Nothing. Had I made a difference in anybody's life, including my own? No.

The sun had been set for about five hours by the time I backed out of the parking lot. The rain had stopped and the temperature had dropped to where bits of ice were forming on the windscreen. The Molson Brewery clock said: 11:38—HAPPY NEW YEAR! I was cold and I had to defecate. I drove across town, observing crowds celebrating in the streets and coming and going from different establishments, be they public or private.