Small Change (15 page)

Sweet of you to call (I say this and hear Claude Rains saying to Ingrid Bergman, “Sweet of you to wait.” If you knew how many times I’ve watched
Notorious
you’d lock me up.) Since we spoke I’ve been sitting here thinking, as I often do, about the sort of friendship that lasts. I’ve been home long enough to see which New York friendships have fallen away, and which old friendships in Canada have remained. I usually conclude that the amount of room we give each other is the key.
Room
and
generosity
are the words that float around in my mind. But I like your word better.
Consistency
. You were saying you don’t register with your students because you are always the same, while other teachers, more mercurial, vivid, unpredictable, even mean, carry children along in their wake. You said children don’t appreciate what we come to value so much as adults: consistency in our relationships.

Some old hurt was in your voice, along with mild outrage and your usual eloquence, as you described the teacher with perfect hair who shakes her wave effortlessly into place a hundred times a day.

It’s late. I hear the cars on the highway and think of you listening. This is an old woman’s pleasure, and a child’s. Last night Annie called out at three in the morning, her eyes wide
with nightmare, and we listened to the cars for quite a while. Was it your sister who was so devastated when Glenn Gould died, leaving her without the certainty that at least one other person in Toronto was also awake?

I see you with the bedside light on, a book in your hands. You are still my well-read friend. I hesitate to say this, too superstitious to put good things into words, but I say it anyway. What would I do without you?

I
saw him in the library. I was coming upstairs from the lower level devoted to fiction to the main level check-out. He was at the counter, in profile, old and composed. His skin was smooth, his hair was evenly grey, he was wearing an elegant black coat. This was the first time I had seen him in eight years.

I hesitated for only a second (Peter eyeing Mr. McGregor and beyond him the gate), then walked quickly right behind him, my eyes fixed on the turnstile ahead, and beyond that, the revolving doors. Whether he saw me when I passed behind him or recognized me from the back (I would have recognized him from any angle), I don’t know. I passed within two feet of him and had to wait for a man to emerge from the revolving doors. Then the doors spat me into the lobby where sliding doors opened and I was in the street.

Still I didn’t relax. I stood on the corner with my back to the library straddling both possibilities: left or right, whichever first turned green, waiting to spring forward at the first break in traffic. For the rest of the day I felt shaken, overpowered by the black and dapper figure waiting to check out books.

The new black coat was a surprise. Could it be cashmere? Leonard Brooks in a cashmere coat? But that would require money and he didn’t spend money. Leonard the non-spender, Leonard the non-reader, Leonard alone – who was never alone. In an expensive new coat and unaccompanied, taking out books.

At home I made a pot of tea and looked out the window for a long time. I looked for big words to balance all the hurts – innocence, betrayal, humiliation. But big words don’t begin to compensate for small memories: the film of grime in his bathroom, the smell from the one damp towel, the stray hairs in the sink and on the floor, the tired joke about his new pair of sheets waiting for the right occasion, the thought of his body, his softness, his sentimentality. The pity he aroused, the companionship he offered, the need he sensed in me, the need he cultivated so well. The cardboard box he used for a bedside table, the late-night phone calls, the unannounced arrivals for dinner, the refusal to buy furniture, the man as child, the sexual fear. He used to phone me after I had fallen asleep and say, “Meet me for breakfast at the Star Café, eight o’clock, don’t be late. And Bethie?”

“Yes.”

“We’re making memories.”

Here are some memories, Bethie’s memories of Leonard B.

Soft waist. Receding hairline. Long nails. The kindness and manipulation. The propriety and dishonesty. The cagey unconscious bullshit.

I remember him telling me once, when he was very tired, that he felt like a crushed rose. It was evening. He was sitting across from me in a booth in a restaurant, a small prematurely old man resting his head in his left hand, the palm scarred from breaking a lamp when he was three, the Mender fingers tipped by those unnerving nails.

“When you were growing up what did you want to be?” I asked him.

“A child,” he said. “I was happy as a child.”

The child rarely strayed from the movies on
TV
. He absorbed Maurice Chevalier’s smile, too large for a face that retained the pallor and quickness-to-tire of a long boyhood sickness. His eyes were permanently soft and tender, tattooed by the pale blue light from so much secondhand romance. “You have to see
Moulin Rouge”
he told me, “it teaches so much about loneliness.”

I had heard this before. I didn’t think I had much to learn about loneliness. By this time, Leonard made me feel lonelier than anyone else I knew.

There was the man’s growth of hair on those soft boy arms, uncultivated, unwanted, unweeded, like long hairs dangling
from the sides of a brash, or pubic hairs gone grey and sparse. There was the way he put his arms around my waist and pulled me towards his face. I would smile, turn my head to one side, or lean back if our foreheads touched. Those hugs went on for a long time, each one and all of them together, pressing me against his soft body while he whispered into my ear, “Mad about you, so mad about you.” I turned my head away from his breath.

We used to work together and we used to work late (I mean
late;
sometimes finishing the magazine at dawn), then we walked through Allan Gardens past the illuminated fountain, the greenhouse, the flowerbeds, to a bench where we sank down and breathed in the heavy scent of dust, fumes, grass, garbage, perfume. Leonard talked and I listened. Politics, old movies, baseball, odd encounters, figures from history; he had a way with an anecdote, a joke, a telling phrase; I listened, and there wasn’t a single thing he said that wasn’t interesting. What do I remember now of all those well-turned sentences? That he loved Johnny Carson, that he wanted to be on
TV
, that he saw himself as a natural entertainer, a witty unassuming moral figure who deserved uninterrupted applause.

He was thirty-five and seemed older. I was twenty-seven and seemed younger. Younger and nicer.

He walked me to the streetcar, then wouldn’t let me get on. Just one more block. Then another. All the way to Parliament Street.

His hands tightened if I pulled away too soon. Shapely hands with single long hairs growing out of the soft skin on
their backs. In elementary school a girl had told him he had nice fingernails for a boy.

In the beginning I felt sure of my footing. I didn’t take his whispers seriously and enjoyed his company – he was unaffected, knowledgeable, and kind – and I felt chosen, honoured in a way, to receive so much attention. And then the friendship turned. There must have been a moment, if I can only think hard enough, when I turned from a listening, flattered, indulgent friend into an insecure worker, humiliated in some indefinable way but so thoroughly that I felt myself crack. I can think of a certain moment.

It was nearly midnight and everyone else had gone home. Leonard came over to my desk with his coat on. His small round face was tired and in need of a shave, but he looked keyed-up and strangely intent.

“You have to go?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “And you have to come with me.” His words were firm and deliberate. I think he had practised that line.

“Casablanca,”
I said, and his face fell.

“Damn Richard.” Richard had taped a note to the cafeteria wall saying the movie would be on at midnight.

I stood up. Leonard hugged me and I pulled back, careful to do so gradually, but he saw the look on my face.

“It wasn’t to be a test,” he said, nervous, apologetic, giddy. “Just a little game.”

The little game: pretending to take me home to his bed.

Outside it was dark and cool. We walked under leafy trees beside large old houses that were very quiet, but not as quiet as we were. The only word in my head was
tired
. In his apartment I sat on the sofa, he took the armchair and murmured much of the dialogue: “Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.”

Not long afterwards I dreamt that I was being led into a motel by Leonard. His name was on the register and above it were the names of prostitutes he had brought before. I tried to run away, but the air pulled at my knees so that I barely moved. Then I was walking down the road. Headlights appeared and to my enormous relief it was X, the man I was in love with. He pulled up beside me in his old car. He got out and spoke to me. I think he smiled as he motioned with his head towards the motel. He was trying to get me to go back. I went back.

Leonard’s sexuality filled the office, his retarded yet active sexuality. I rubbed my forehead, drank weak coffee, found it hard to breathe. He called the women in the office Miss Bethie, Miss Susan, Miss Isabel. He brought juice to the “ladies.” Isabel called him the perfect woman’s friend.

Late one night Leonard and I watched
Sayonara
. Again I sat on the sofa, while from the armchair he made mock-serious comments about “Red Buttons and I.” The next day I was exhausted and disgusted. Suppliant women, I thought to myself. Supple, pliant, malleable, all those l’s, low, before men.

He never asked about the man I lived with and would
marry soon, and I never mentioned him. We talked about my dog. Everyone knew (the women, that is, all the women knew) that this was part of Leonard’s code. The women he fell in love with had to be attached, but the men they were attached to had to be shadowy.

I found myself trying to imagine his sexual fantasies. I suspected they were of two kinds: foreign and domestic. I saw him close his eyes and travel by bus through blond Germany or blonder Holland. His seatmate would be a girl of fifteen, alone and poor, heading to the city to keep an appointment. The nature of the appointment would vary, but her need for reassurance wouldn’t. She would be wearing one of her mother’s dresses: yellow polyester covered with Venetian canals, maroon acetate covered with swans.

In his domestic fantasy he would be living on a farm with his sister. They would drink lemonade on hot afternoons, welcome neighbours who dropped by, brush against each other in the hallway. At night he would lie in bed listening to her move around in her bedroom. Her bare feet would be small and smooth, her thin white nightgown just like the one worn by Shirley Jones in
Oklahoma
.

“I was thinking of you last night,” he would say to me in the morning.

The perfect woman’s friend. I came upon him once right after one of his headaches had lifted. He was at his desk, and it must have been around six in the evening because the office was empty. He looked spent. He looked like a man who had just made love. He reached for my hand and pulled me into his lap.

A year ago I was at my desk writing to old friends to tell them I had moved to Ottawa. I reached for my address book and it fell open to
Leonard Brooks
. His name coiled in black ink off the page. His address was less than a dozen blocks away.

I made myself walk down his street. It took several months to screw up my courage and even then my heart was pounding. A block short of his building, I chickened out and cut over to another street. Some weeks after that I made myself go all the way. This time I took in the stone façade, the old-fashioned windows with their many small panes, the recessed entranceway. I even looked up to the fifth floor and imagined him looking down at me. The building suited him. It was older than his apartment in Toronto, but he was older and so was I. Although it seemed to me that we had always been old, two little old people on little old canes.

At the corner there was a café not unlike one we had gone to in Toronto. From the outside it looked innocuous, white curtains hung in the window and rubber plants occupied the sill. Inside – I’m speaking of the Toronto café now – it was all chrome and leather, muscles and sleek hair. Leonard gave me his mock-alarm look and reached for my hand. “You won’t leave me, will you?” The contrast between us and the others delighted him, and depressed me more than I can say.

We sat in rose-coloured light and he told me the story he had told me the day before. “Yes, you were telling me this yesterday.” But he didn’t stop. He had been waiting for the streetcar at College and Yonge on Sunday night. An elderly
woman waited beside him, the only other person at the stop. They got on the streetcar together, they got off at the same place, they entered the same restaurant, and they ate their suppers alone. He was overwhelmed by the pity of it.

I knew what he wanted. The knowledge made me stubborn and cruel, full of an anger all the more powerful for not having been there a moment before. Even so, he was still my boss, and when he talked about the others in the office, when he said that Isabel and I were better than he was when he started, I looked up at him pained. Didn’t he see that I was much better than Isabel?