The Glass Harmonica (18 page)

There seemed to be a set scale to her laundry, Len thought, the first few items creaking into view, the line moving with jerks and stops as each new piece of fabric was added. It was a diminishing scale, as if the first items to be hung were the largest and most difficult and each piece that followed was slightly more manageable. In Vernie's case, the first two things were bedsheets—looped over the top of the line and hanging down loose and wavering—and then a precise row of squared-off towels, clothespins in each corner and an extra one in the middle, to be sure. After that it was trousers, some facing towards Len, some away, the ones facing towards him with their flies open and the corners at the waist button hanging down, gaping, as if the jeans were trying to undress themselves from the line.

And still Len sat, watching the clothing move slowly out.

A row of tight knit tops—women's tops. And then a short line of women's underwear, all together, like a flock of small lingerie birds twittering brightly together.

Len couldn't help but think it was too early in the year for hanging out laundry. You'd have to be really keen for the smell of fresh air on your clothes, he thought, unless you were one of those crazies who went whole hog and put the stuff out in the middle of winter just to haul it back in stiff and half freeze-dried so you could throw it in the dryer anyway.

But that underwear, the colours and shapes and the simple fluttering drape of it—it gave him a quick trembling feeling in his chest, and he found he couldn't stop staring.

Len waited until he heard the Taylors' back door slam before he got up and went back inside.

Len woke up in the middle of the night, lost for a few moments before realizing that he was in his own upstairs room, and that Ingrid was sleeping quietly next to him. Len realized that he'd been dreaming about Vernie Taylor—not that he could picture her face in the dream, but he was sure it was about Vernie Taylor nonetheless. And that he'd had a wet dream, the first one he could remember in thirty years, since at least high school, and that he was soaking wet.

Embarrassed, he tried to get out of bed as quietly as he could, the front of his pyjama pants a sticky mess, while Ingrid mumbled and shifted slightly in her sleep next to him.

A day later and outside, and Len suddenly thought there is a point in spring where everything just leaps forward. One moment the grass is gradually shifting into green and the next there are dandelions, big and bold and staring, and they are like the starter's signal in a hundred-yard sprint: as soon as the gun sounds, everything is off and running. Biology just waiting to burst with that signal; all of it held back there, stymied, waiting for the moment for buds to burst and flowers to throw their lust outwards.

Sitting on the deck again, Len could suddenly see more flowers than he could possibly begin to name. There were some that he knew, some of the more obvious ones. The last of the tulips, shedding their petals now and leaving short-lived, deadheaded and obscene pistils. Buttercups and forget-me-nots, just illicit weeds waiting to be pulled up along garden edges but flowers nonetheless, and then the starting greenery of some of the more obvious flowers he knew names for, like bleeding heart and poppy.

There were others that he wished he could name, if only he had more experience with their appearance and smell and feel. It's funny how things can escape you when you haven't taken the time to look and touch, he thought. If I was a little bit more of a gardener, Len thought, I'd think about words like
foxglove
and
lupin
and a picture would jump into my head as quickly as if I thought about something familiar, like the feel of silk or denim.
Laburnum
—he'd heard the word before, thought it had a sound that bordered on the obscene.

Len could only see flashes of Mrs. Purchase working along her side of the fence now, little more than glimpses through camouflaging leaves that were now fully open.

Mrs. Purchase would know every flower here, he thought.

Mrs. Purchase would know everything.

Every now and then he'd see the silver flash of her gardening trowel driving down, as bright and fast-moving in the sun as if she were impaling something dangerous on the tip of a bayonet. Len could hear the blade sliding into the earth, the sharp scrape of it as it moved past small stones caught in the soil.

And then he heard something else. Vernie's door again, and then the familiar sound of the heavy laundry basket thumping down on the deck.

First into sight, it was dark blue coveralls, obviously belonging to Vernie's husband Reg, jerking into view. Then it was towels again, and pants, and then socks.

In its own way, it was almost like a striptease, he thought. We're just working our way down through layer after layer, and perhaps that's almost the point of it all.

Finally, gloriously, it was underwear again, first the spare utility of men's jockey shorts, then a breathtakingly brief line of plain women's underwear, white and cotton. Then several pairs of black panties, and finally a low-cut pair of wine red underwear, opaque and somehow shiny when they turned just the right way, and Len sat transfixed for a moment, watching the way the underwear seemed to move in the wind as if they were made of a sheet of solid material.

Maybe polyester, Len guessed, and the finger and thumb on his right hand were moving together as if of their own volition as he tried to imagine which one of the many fabrics he'd ever felt would feel like the touch of that pair of underwear. In his head Len was flitting through a dozen department stores, past scores of clothes racks providing cover for the inevitable shoplifters, rows of underwear there but somehow sterile because they weren't part of anyone yet. The feel of a hundred different pieces of fabric under his fingers, yet none of them that could possibly live up to the promise of these.

Len wished Ingrid had something like that last pair of underwear: something deep red and cut low across the hips, something saucy that you might catch just a glimpse of and realize that your wife was up to no good, that she was thinking about you every bit as much as you were thinking about her. Like a high school girlfriend sticking her tongue out at you, and then using one hand to undo the top button on her blouse while she sat across the classroom from you. The kind of thing, Len thought, that might make me want to slide my hands up under Ingrid's dress while she was standing at the sink.

And then he stopped again. Stopped, like always.

Because nothing as simple and easy as a new pair of underwear would ever make one little scrap of difference with Ingrid. You don't spend twenty years with someone, living with one set of marital rules, and ever expect that she will be able to turn on a dime and be anything other than exactly what she naturally is already, Len thought. You can't climb into bed one night and just announce that you want it all to be different, that this time you want all the lights left on, or that this time it will be fine to go at it right there in the hall by the stairs, the front door only a few scant feet away, only fogged glass between your nakedness and the street.

If that turns out to be my lot in life, even if I've made my bed and slept exactly, precisely, in it for going on twenty years now, Len thought, that doesn't mean I'll live my whole life without ever waking up in the middle of the night and wishing that something could be different. It was something he'd thought about before, something that he already knew was a dead end.

Like I could explain it to Ingrid, Len thought. Like I could explain it to anyone. Like I could even begin to tell anyone that my wife didn't want anything to do with me in bed anymore, and that every single rejection would make me feel like even more of a big fat slob than any mirror ever would.

On the line, Vernie's red panties waved back and forth, a scarlet and saucy flag.

Something, more a lack of motion than anything else, snapped Len out of his reverie and made him stare across the garden and across the Tinkers' yard as well.

The wind was shifting the leaves at the edge of the garden, but behind them Mrs. Purchase wasn't moving at all. Len could see her red bucket and flashes of her yellow shirt; he could even see the shiny silver of the trowel, held elbow-high. And he couldn't shake the feeling that, back there through the leaves, while he was watching Vernie's laundry, Mrs. Purchase was motionless, watching him. And Len knew all about watching.

He shook himself upright and headed around the side of the house, moving towards the door.

140
McKay Street

SAM NEWHOOK

JULY 21, 2003

T
HE SUN
rose facing straight onto the upper side of McKay Street, sunlit mornings bright and hard and hurting in your eyes like thrown sand. It was two years before Mrs. Purchase would catch Len staring at Vernie's laundry, but she was already watching everything.

Mornings were like snapped-open window shades, Sam Newhook thought. The sun was already pouring in harsh through the small rectangle of his bathroom window, while he was absently scratching his stomach, naked, his eyes half closed against light that seemed determined to bounce off every single tiled surface in the room and fly straight into his face again. Heavy curtains, light curtains—it didn't seem to matter. It was the kind of light that bled through the weave and poked around the room in brilliant pinpricks, waking him far earlier than he wanted.

He wasn't sure if he was ever going to get used to mornings like this, to the way the sun caromed off the flat sky and the sea at a slight angle, so that it seemed to double itself, storming into the house always at a full run, ignoring everything that tried to stand in its way. But at least the fog was gone. Sam wasn't absolutely sure which was worse, the glare or the grey, but even with his eyes still stinging, he was pretty sure it was the fog.

Sam hadn't had the house long, and was still repeating the simple mistakes over and over again: There was the short step down outside the bathroom, only an inch or so, but it jarred his back every time he stepped off it unexpectedly. One of the cupboard drawers in the kitchen seemed to roll closed faster than it should, jamming his fingers between it and the countertop. Even the sliding closet door upstairs—the one that skipped out of its track because it was square and the house, overall, wasn't. Anywhere. The way he pulled the sliding door hard across to open it made it jump out of its short railbed every single time.

He knew the missteps were a collection of things that he just hadn't experienced enough yet to have them built right into him, things he didn't know so well that they had become practised and ingrained. It was a new house, he thought, a new house built out of an old house and oddly filled with new sharp corners.

A new house to him, anyway.

Sam still had trouble keeping the address straight, kept giving out the number to his apartment to taxicab drivers instead, an apartment that was half the city away and in the wrong direction too, so that it was an expensive mistake any time he was drunk or wasn't carefully paying attention.

His new house was one of a trio of row houses that a developer had snapped up as a group and had then renovated throughout, knocking down walls and putting in new floors to label the places “open concept,” plunking soaker tubs with jets in the upstairs bathrooms and pressure-treated patios out beyond glass doors that opened off the master bedrooms. The kind of places you advertise with a sturdy-looking hunk in a white bathrobe out on the deck with a steaming cup of coffee, master of everything he surveys. And that's exactly how you're supposed to feel in the model suite, Sam thought. And it worked fine for him.

It was like they'd found a realtor's checklist somewhere and followed it to the letter, a list of things that a young professional expected as a matter of right when picking out a house. There was only a thumbnail of lawn out back, the grass just recovering from the rough surgery of construction and coming up green in weedy patches, but the market was looking for dinner parties, not gardens or picnics.

Sam had put a bid in as soon as he looked at the place, and he hadn't realized until the lawyer searched the deed just how much the price had gone up between the time the developer had bought the places and when Sam's offer had been accepted on the renovated space. After he found how much the markup was, Sam felt a little like he'd been cheated, but the offer was signed by then and the lawyer suggested he should just try to make the best of it, that he was getting what he wanted anyway.