The Freedom in American Songs (12 page)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Handsome Devil

 

 

I was looking for something
new
on the bulletin board just inside the door of the Duckworth Lunch; a kiln firing on the beach—did I want a handmade bodhran?—when a handsome devil came in from the avenue and looked me up and down. I had a new haircut and my yellow dress and he said, “I haven't seen you around before.”

The Duckworth Lunch had been my haunt ever since it used to be on the other side of the road, and now a lot of new people came in. Maybe this guy was one of them. I'd sort of preferred the old place—it's normally the disadvantages of a place that attract me. There was more sunlight now, and we had a sparkling view of the harbour and the war memorial, around which the daffodils had bloomed. Years ago, when I lived in an apartment across the road, I used to nip a cenotaph daff now and then to brighten up my windowsill, but my friend Janice Quigley saw me do it and said I should feel ashamed for removing flowers that had been planted in memory of men who had sacrificed their lives in both wars. In fact Janice Quigley has never been the same toward me since, which is too bad, because her reprimand was one of those moments when you know someone is absolutely right and there has been something amiss in your world view until now, in fact you have been brought up all wrong, and you try to change your behaviour accordingly. When I stole those daffodils and lived in that apartment, a man used to sit under the memorial's bronze fisherman spying at me until I noticed him and put up some curtains. But this man now, this handsome devil, was nothing like that creep. He was not going to throw up in one of the public wastebaskets anytime soon.

“Where do you live?” he took out a notebook.

“Dog's Pond Extension.”

“How far is that from St. John's?”

“It's a forty-five minute drive.”

He assessed this.

“On a day like today,” I added. Real estate ads called it a half hour commute, which might have been true if you were manning a Formula One racing hovercraft. I liked to be honest about the length of that drive when anyone asked. Forty-five minutes was more or less accurate now, but come mid-February …

“Do you mind giving me your address so I can drive out and visit you tomorrow?”

I must have been feeling sunny because I scrawled a map on one of his pages with X marking the spot. “There's a wall of aspens. You have to keep peeping through gaps until you see a black house with a red roof.”

I don't usually go in for handsome devils and they never take a second look at me under normal circumstances. My stars must have been aligned and sparkling upon me. I felt a little tug that said he was too clean-cut, that he didn't have enough disadvantages, but I tried to ignore it. I went home and tidied up the kitchen and swept the place and even used a bit of Mister Clean. The next morning I showered and put on my blue and white dress and an apron, and started making bread. I decided to complement my snappy new haircut with some wholesome homesteading skills and greet the handsome devil as if I whipped up loaves of bread all the time, their tops glossy with melted butter.

I realized he hadn't said what time he would come, so I aimed the loaves to come out of the oven at 11:30, and somehow in my mind I decided that he would arrive between then and 2:30 in the afternoon, so I made a pot of delicious soup. The thing about soup is that you can make great, amazing, killer-garlic and herb and crouton and whatever soup without a recipe, using things you happen to have in the fridge, and if you have a bit of ancient parmesan to grate into it so much the better. But by 2:30 there was still no sign of the handsome devil, and I started to get a bit miffed. I remembered his little notebook. What a fool I had been! And why should I make loaves and soup for the likes of him, and who was he and where did he live, anyway? Who was asking whom to prove what to whom here? And why was I putting up with it? I didn't even know the handsome devil. What right did he have … and so on, until, at 4:30, there came a friendly sounding rap at my door. I amaze myself sometimes with the speed at which I can travel from condemnation to forgiveness. I glanced in the mirror and was pleased to see I still looked flushed from all the baking in a pretty sort of way, and I decided to leave my apron on as a sign of casual industriousness.

But lo and behold who should it be at the door but Janice Quigley's ex-husband, large as life with a rum gut and a set of groomed whiskers, and not the handsome devil at all.

“You're home,” he said, as if he came to visit me all the time, and I remembered that he had a horse named Kitty, about which Janice had expressed impatience, and that every Christmas he dressed up in a red suit and hitched Kitty up to an old-fashioned carriage and went visiting distant cousins and business associates or anyone who he knew had children, around the bay—he and Janice were childless. I knew this but I didn't know much else about Maurice Quigley, except I remembered his work had something to do with town water supplies and pipelines and reservoirs, and he was away a lot. And it was this work that brought him here that day. He had, he said, to look at some joints in the Murre's Hill pipeline.

“And I remembered old Janice sayin' you lived up this way, and it was such a great old day out there now and I have to dry out some of my new ducks and I wondered if you'd like to come along and take a look at them while I have them all laid out. Perfect ducks, they are, if I do say so myself.”

“Ducks?”

“In my truck. Come out and see them for yourself. Take off that apron and come out with me to the site. I've got a bit of lunch on the go. Perfect day for it, come on girl.” I could tell he was looking at me appreciatively, and while he was not my type of man—he had perhaps far too many disadvantages even for this lover of imperfections—I thought, why not. Why the hell not. So I whipped my apron bow undone and put on my cashmere cardigan and an Isadora Duncan scarf and left my homestead to itself and got in Maurice Quigley's Dodge Ram.

“So these are your ducks.”

“Yup. Gessoed ready for a lick of paint after we dry them out for an hour or two.”

The ducks were carved out of wood and had been coated in white.

“They must have taken hours to carve.”

“Well what am I gonna do now Janice has gone and left me on my own in the nighttimes?” We were driving down Comerford's Road to the main highway. He started singing.
The silence of a falling star lights up a purple sky
… I noticed he had a mickey of rum sitting in the door pocket. I did not want to be part of some drunken ex-husband's duck-painting fantasy. What was I doing in the truck? Had the handsome devil's standing me up affected me so greatly I would stoop to this? But Maurice Quigley said, “Have a look in that hamper. Thin as a rail. You're like that fairy story where the girl sticks a twig out of her cage so the old witch won't eat her up because she's so scrawny. You need a bit of fat on your bones. Have a look.”

I looked in the Coleman cooler that sat between us. We were going up Clarence Cove Mountain Road where the pipeline snaked down, a gravel road nobody went up except maintenance crews and teenagers. He swerved into a tiny clearing beside a one-window shack that had a chicken wire fence and a padlocked gate just as I laid my hand on a real French baguette, not the supermarket kind, and I saw a hunk of St. André cheese in there as well before he said, “Get the knife out, girl—cut yourself a piece before you waste away to nothing. Here.” He pulled a Husky utility knife out of his pocket, sliced a sliver of the cheese and gave it to me. St. André cheese has a wallop of gorgeous butterfat flavour suffused with the merest hint of bacterial culture. I had been eating convenience store mild orange cheddar and Maurice Quigley might as well have injected me with some bliss-inducing drug.

“Come on,” he said, “We'll get out and walk up the line and I'll set these ducks down to dry and I'll pour us a glass of wine and you can babysit my ducks while I go get to the bottom of the missing rivets at checkpoint seventeen.” He collected the ducks in his arms like babies and gave me three to carry up the hill. He had a blanket rolled up under one arm and he laid it on some grass and showed me where he wanted the ducks laid out on the pipe in full sun, then he went back and got the hamper and a couple of wineglasses and poured some Bin 444 and we raised a glass there among the vetch and the hay and the pipeline that smelled faintly of tar.

“To ducks,” he said, and cut me a piece of salami that was hard and transparent and had cracked peppercorn in it. The handsome devil who had not shown up could go straight to bloody hell. I thought about sex with the handsome devil, and with this pipeline maintenance duck painter whom Janice Quigley had, at one time, married. What was marriage, really, but an extension of the present moment, in which a woman might think, this is okay, sitting here by a pipeline in the sun. Better than some other marital situations. But of course Maurice Quigley and I were not married, and something in me could not be certain that either he or the handsome devil had sex in mind, concerning me. This was a blind spot I had. Somehow, despite years and even a lifetime of evidence to the contrary, a part of me persisted in thinking maybe these few men who expressed a slight interest in my company wanted human company that might not necessarily be sexual. They might want somebody to talk to and laugh with about the absurdities of the world. Everything did not necessarily lead, in their minds, to us taking off our clothes and having sex. I kept thinking this might be possible, and I know it seems foolish, but I sort of wished it were. I wished I could sit at the pipeline with Maurice Quigley and have great bread and cheese and wine and salami and a rip-roaring great discussion of life, without having to decide whether or not I was going to let him kiss me and take off my clothes and do things of which Janice Quigley would, again, perhaps even more than the military daffodils, take a dim view, and to which I myself took a less than enthusiastic shine.

“Janice never mentioned you make ducks,” I decided to invoke both the ducks and Janice, thinking one or the other or perhaps both subjects might lift his own mind from any thoughts of rolling around on the embankment with me, in case it had gone in that direction.

“Janice never minded nothin' about those ducks,” he said. “She didn't want to hear nothing about them. No.” He was eating the salami delicately for a man of his type, I thought, and he reminded me of Bumper, a dog my old boyfriend once had, who took Vienna sausages into his mouth with a quivering finesse that was surprising, as if Bumper had been a human trapped in a dog's body, a thing that often occurs to me when I look at dogs. Maybe Maurice Quigley had been a bit more like the handsome devil in another life, and maybe the handsome devil was devolving into a next life in which his own appearance would match his abysmal manners. It was too bad, I thought, that the Maurice Quigleys of the world could be so underestimated based on their appearance. But by this time I was on my third glass of wine.

“But you,” he said, “you know what you should make?”

“What?”

“Jellyfish.”

I remembered a souvenir café off the wharf near Caplin Cove where a hermit woman made carrot cake and mermaid Christmas tree ornaments and thrummed trigger mittens and sold them to tourists from June to September. She hadn't made any jellyfish but her whole stretch of shoreline had been full of them and I had hung over her wharf licking cream cheese icing and looking at their lit-up trails and thinking how beautiful they were.

“What would you make jellyfish out of?” I asked Maurice Quigley.

“You, now. You could think of something. You could sell those jellyfish for three hundred dollars each.”

“Is that how much people pay for your ducks?”

“People will pay,” he said, “a lot more than three hundred dollars for a Maurice Quigley original.”

“Really?”

“The last one I sold of this King Eider here,” he pointed to a duck with a head that looked as if it wore a misshapen crash helmet, “a man down in Florida paid seven hundred and ninety five dollars for. You can have a look when I get it done, and you'll see. It's the carving and the detail. You gotta have really precision-made detailing and you can't let it go under the price that it's worth. Sometimes you have to wait. Jellyfish, now, you could make a killing if you went about it the right way. No one is making jellyfish, but you could.”

“But isn't there, like, a duck market, hunters and the like? There are no jellyfish collectors, I don't think.”

“You'd be surprised.”

He went and checked the pipeline, then came back and wrapped up the remains of the salami and baguette—he was fastidious about not leaving any garbage on the landscape—and I thought he was about to roll up the blanket and descend back to his truck, when he said, pointing to his smallest white duck, “That one there now, is a real duck, just pretending to be made out of wood.” He sat watching it, as if expecting its live properties to become manifest if we could only be still enough: a feather blowing off in the wind, an infinitesimal lift of wings. I sat motionless and joined in the game, and part of me was ready to believe him—the same part, perhaps, that had been equally willing to be swept off her feet by that handsome devil in the Duckworth Lunch.

“Have you ridden it?” I ventured. Not only was it alive, the smallest duck could also change in size, I surmised, and become a giant, fairytale duck, able—like a magic carpet—to transport us over this golden-grassed landscape and over the sea to who knew what sorts of minarets and gilded roofs. I remembered reading that the crows of St. Petersburg had a habit of sliding down the golden shingles, purely for the joy of it, and that Russian officials were trying to exterminate them because the gold was real, and the crows were gradually wearing right through it, scattering gold dust in the air and rendering the shingles worthless and ordinary, like shingles in less glorious cities.