The Chrome Suite (2 page)

ook at this one,” Amy had said as she held the tee shirt up against her chest, modelling it for Piotr.
IF YOU LOVE SOMEONE
,
LET HIM GO
.
IF HE DOESN
’
T COME BACK
,
HUNT HIM DOWN AND KILL HIM
. That was yesterday in a tee-shirt store on Yonge Street. They left Toronto early this morning and are on the highway now heading up towards Owen Sound and the ferry at Tobermory. Hunt him down, Amy thinks as she drives. It seemed hilarious at the time but she wonders now at how the shop is allowed to sell tee shirts like that. More than likely because it says hunt
him
down and not her, she reasons, otherwise there would be a crowd of demonstrators outside the store.

Piotr sits beside her, reading, face hidden behind
The Globe and Mail
he bought outside their hotel earlier. Because she’s usually more alert than he is in the morning, she agreed to take on the first shift of driving, but she wishes now that she hadn’t. She’s still in shock and in the state of heightened awareness that a sleepless night brings. Nerve ends buzz and her mind races ahead, beyond the horizon. The
landscape when they’d first entered country was softer, an opaque misty blend of colours, but as the sun rises behind them it becomes too brittle, too bright, and she must squint through watery eyes against the sharpness of it.

“Canadian humour is very strange. I don’t get it,” Piotr had said when she held the shirt up against her chest. He had been tense and wary and I should have known, Amy thinks: doors closing one by one, his flat-surfaced conversations, cheerful voice. I should have guessed.

She’d explained the original saying.

“I still don’t get it.”

“I think it means, more or less, love me or die.”

“Oh, I see.” He’d spoken quietly, turned his back to her, faced the window and the street, the shapes of people passing by. “All right.” And then he’d told her that the time had come. He was leaving her within a week.

Amy squeezes the brakes to reduce speed. They are approaching another of the small villages and towns that have been strung out all along the way. It seems that she’s barely able to gain highway speed before she must slow down again. She’s caught by the old-world look of this one. Quaint, she thinks, of the use of stone, the flash of blue lobelia trailing from window boxes, and the gingerbread-house look of the store-fronts. She drops her sunglasses down to cover eyes that brim suddenly with an unreasonable longing, the desire she has to stop and find a house. The two of them, they’ll enter it and disappear.

“Nice,” she says as they leave the village limits. They could grow to be Mrs. and Mr. Amy Barber, an ordinary, elderly, and tenderly devoted couple who die within months of one another: tree limbs entwined and inseparable. I didn’t see it coming, Amy thinks, because I didn’t want to. If I had, I would have had to leave him. She watches the needle climb till it reaches a safe ten kilometres above the limit, then she holds it there. This constant stopping and starting, barely gaining highway speed and then having to cut back again, grates on
her, and she worries that they’ll miss the ferry. She doesn’t want to have to wait. She doesn’t want to sit beside Piotr on their grassy knoll overlooking the water, or pass the time on the glass-bottom boat peering at rusted hulks of sunken ships, or stand beside him on the deck while he scans the horizon with the binoculars she gave him as a Christmas gift in their third year. No! she says inwardly and slaps the steering wheel with the flat of her hand.

Piotr glances up from the newspaper, his expression quizzical.

“Anything interesting in the paper?” She asks the question he usually asks.

The question posed. Amy: a reasonable facsimile of a civilized person, a mature adult who understands and accepts that when someone says “I no longer love you,” there is nothing you can do to change it. You would think she would know that by now. But no, as she sat beside Piotr in the car, driving off into the sunset in her mind, she still believed that as long as she was breathing there was something she could do. Loving and being loved was like swinging on a swing or flying. Both will and action, but will mostly. Her ferocious will would make him continue to love her and never, never leave
.

“More on the massacre in the Katyn Forest,” he says. He closes the paper and folds it down into a square. He’s referring to the killing of fifteen thousand Polish officers and soldiers in 1942. He’s told her the story of his father’s narrow escape, how he’d stayed home that day, in his study, listening to his short-wave radio while most of his friends and acquaintances were snatched from city streets in broad daylight. “Photographs,” Piotr says, “of the burial sight. A witness. They can’t deny it much longer.” When he asks her the question, “Anything interesting in the paper?” she’s always perplexed to find that she can’t remember a single item of importance, only incidents,
small stories like the one about a woman who loses her wedding ring while out fishing on her honeymoon and then goes back there years later, lands a trophy-size fish, and, when her husband guts it, she discovers the lost ring.

Piotr removes his glasses, lifts the binoculars hanging at his neck, and scans the sky. The landscape has once again opened up to the weathered silver wood of New England-style barns, gently rolling green hills. He’s searching for a bird in flight. In their frequent trips across the country, Piotr has followed the gliding flight of many birds and claimed that most of them are hawks. The cords in his neck grow taut as he twists away from Amy. She sees the pebbly flesh-coloured mole at his hairline near the nape of his neck and she wants to put her finger against it and transmit the message: I know you. I know the smell you leave behind in a room, strong, like that of a furry burrowing animal. How you travel constantly to deny that burrowing instinct and a niggling, unsettling suspicion that perhaps you are, after all, a very ordinary person.

He senses her scrutiny and lowers the binoculars. He turns and smiles with a quick little nod and a wink, guessing at what she’s thinking. “It will be okay, don’t worry,” he says, as he had kept trying to reassure her throughout most of the previous night. Where love has ended, friendship will continue on and on. They have become too close, he says, for it not to. Like twins, they read one another’s minds. Fuck you, Amy thinks, and returns his wink, daring him to read her mind now. As he turns away his face drops with shock. “Amy! Watch!”

Oh God, she thinks. She has strayed into the path of an oncoming car. Her reaction is immediate and swift as their car swerves sharply to the right and safety. The other driver leans on the horn and its sound is a banner of alarm flapping in passing. Or self-righteous indignation, Amy thinks. Sorry bub.

Piotr breaks the silence that follows. “I think you’re tired.”

“Probably. I didn’t sleep much last night.”

“Oh, I see.” He turns away, eyes fixed on the passing landscape. “You think this is easy for me?” he asks.

“Oh, yes, I do. I think so.” The words are spat and he shrinks from the sound of them. Just once she would like him to experience her savage anger, a seed which had lain dormant during their six years together, grown now, a hard stone.

They don’t speak for several moments. Then he straightens in the seat, brushes invisible crumbs or lint from his pants; a signal that he is changing the tone of their conversation. “Would you like me to spell you off for a while?” he asks.

“No, it’s okay. I was day-dreaming, that’s all.” She resolves to be more careful.

“What were you day-dreaming about?” he asks, his voice firm, underlining his determination to set a new, safer course for discussion.

“I was thinking about what I might write next,” she lies.

“Well, I thought we’d agreed.”

“Maybe we agreed.”

Clean, she thinks, of the landscape, restful, pastoral. A bit of mist still clings to low ground in places, and beyond, in a pasture, cows drink from a stream. Green. A Constable landscape. Pasted on for effect. Impenetrable.

She did sign a contract. Last night. She agreed to adapt a novel into a film script. She agreed for her own reasons, that while he goes off to research a project in Belgium, while he pursues his goal to become a Coppola or a Miloš Forman, she’ll stay behind and continue to spin his straw, his often convoluted and vague ideas, into words. A friendship of convenience, now that love is gone.

“Are you having second thoughts? Maybe it would be better if you worked with someone else. Perhaps you want to.” His voice is hurt, worried-sounding.

“No, no. It’s not that. It’s just that I think … maybe …” Amy stalls and her throat constricts. “Well, I think that it’s time I write something of my own. For myself.” The idea comes as a surprise to her.

“What would you write?” He seems equally surprised.

She doesn’t reply. She thinks of the journals lying in a trunk. The pages and pages of years put down, bits of poetry and crude attempts to turn her history into fiction.

He drops the newspaper to the floor, reaches across the space between them, and turns on the radio, scanning through a series of stations until he finds the familiar voice of the
CBC
. He’s concerned about the threat of forest fires on the other side of Thunder Bay and the highway closing down. He has an airline ticket and an appointment with a film producer living in Brussels. He will travel to Belgium to meet her there. A woman he knows from film school in Poland. Elizabeth, an old friend, he explained. Amy feels the warmth of his arm as it brushes against hers. She looks down at the sweep of fine dark hairs on his skin and the sprinkle of moles across it. She wants to touch him. A man’s voice breaks the silence, drowning out the hum of tires against blacktop. “Where you white people have gone wrong is that you have forgotten that you are human,” his voice says with smooth inflections. “You have forgotten your children. You have forgotten where you have buried your fathers. You have forgotten that the earth is your mother.”

You white people, Amy thinks, startled at being addressed in this manner.

“It’s true. You white people don’t care about your dead,” Piotr says. He has often described All Saints’ Day, the day set aside to honour the dead with the placing of candles and flowers on graves.

Amy knows and knows. At present all eyes are turned on the Soviet Republic states. But in the past, attention had been focused on Eastern Europe for an entire winter, and hardly a day had gone by when she hadn’t been reminded where the countries of Czechoslovakia,
Yugoslavia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania were. She has seen countless dreary documentaries on “The Journal” of their religious and folk customs, including All Saints’ Day. These people all look the same to Amy, regardless of their nationality. Colourless. Drab. Smiling into the camera and displaying rows of teeth that look spot-welded. Jaws: the character in the James Bond movie with his deadly stainless-steel smile, a parody of the dental work of the people of Eastern Europe. She thinks that All Saints’ Day is a good day for those who sell candles.

“I think the man was making a point about the environment. And there’s no country more polluted than yours,” Amy says. They don’t have anything to look forward to, she thinks, that’s why they put so much store in looking back, calling it culture or tradition.

“Yes, I know.” He lifts the binoculars once again and begins his search for hawks. As he squints, the white scar at the corner of his eye disappears into folds of skin. A duelling scar, he’d said with irony when she first met him. She had perceived his enigmatic response, his self-protective nature, to be arrogance. He had puzzled her. It had never happened before that she disliked a man and at the same time became prickly-skinned with lust by the smell of him, sticky with desire at the sound of his voice on the telephone.

The physical attraction would last about six months, Amy had thought. Six months of eating one another’s faces off. Hot, furtive hours snatched from work for rutting. It was laughable in its intensity, the stuff that inspires satirical comedy; they knew that and were secretive, like cats.

But near the end of the first six months he fell asleep one night and stayed. This was a summer night, hot, humid. Amy went outside and sat on the deck in her bathrobe, the smell of him still clinging to her skin. And fingerprints, Amy thought, my entire body covered in fingerprints. She was unsettled by his presence in the room above her, asleep in her bed, as unsettled as he would be, she knew, when
he awoke and found himself there in the morning. A light flicked on two yards down and then Daria, Amy’s friend, stepped outside. Amy shrank back into the shadows. Daria stood on the steps looking out over her newly landscaped yard. As she turned to go inside, she saw Amy and waved. Wonderful, Amy thought, as Daria tiptoed barefoot down the lane, she’ll see Piotr’s car and put things together. Daria pushed through the gate, clutching her robe against her narrow body. “God, what a night for sleeping, eh?” she said. Worrying, Amy knew, about her 5:00 a.m. call for work. She entered the yard, seemingly not noticing Piotr’s car parked beside the garage.