Unless (17 page)
But I must start thinking seriously about Alicia and Romans sex life. I have to be braver about it this time round. An awful maidenly daintiness runs through the pages of
My Thyme Is Up
, a prudery that has nothing to do with sex in the twenty-first century. They
slept
together,
Roman and Alicia. They melted in each other’s arms, buttery and sweet. An ethereal transaction was attempted as they bedded down, yes, on their very first date. There was no fumbling with condoms, his or hers, no guilt, no actuarial accountings, no position three, four, or five bolstered up by beams and rope, just two human bodies humming up and down the musical scale of skin, bone, creases, shadows, cleanly, singingly, besottedly droll. But the real running syrups and juice of sex were absent. You could tell that none of this cost anything. You could hardly hear Alicia and Roman breathing. Their kisses tasted scrubbed, like fresh soap and water. Accessible. Decent! Dressed up for ecstasy, but not able to go there. The amperage was there, and Alicia and Roman were willing. Perhaps they lacked the self-forgetfulness that good sex requires, the wanting and then the retreat from want.
Other writers know how to do vivid sex scenes. They’ve got the chronology down, first the languorous removal of clothing, some slow dancing maybe to an old Sinatra record, then the nibbling, the rubbing, the sucking, the smelling, the tasting, the barking commands and screaming surrender, yes, yes, and then, finally, “he enters her.”
Well come right in, my fine fellow, and make yourself at home
.
I have three daughters; naturally I shrink from the thought of embarrassing them with what I publish. People in Orangetown will stare at Tom if I screw up my
nerve and get into whips and leather and suchlike; his patients, out of suspicion, may drift off to other practitioners. I certainly would. Moreover, I don’t know all that much about kinks and jinks. My imagination tends not to drift in that direction.
Oh, loosen up, Ms. Winters.
Sex talk is so eroded, that’s the problem. We’ve all learned it at the movies, and the movies made it up.
Do anything to me. Take me. Overwhelm me. I’m coming. How was it for—?
I can’t, I can’t, I grow rich with disgust, not with sex but with the vocabulary of sex. Besides, light comic fiction does not invite a step-by-step nipple-penis-vulva-clitoris-anus exposition. Alicia is a sensuous woman who understands her body but she does not dwell on the subject of her pubic hair. Pubic hair is out of place in this genre. Roman is allowed to be something of an athlete in bed; a man who plays the trombone, after all, knows about thrusting and triple tonguing and embouchure. Both Alicia and Roman want, both of them desire. Ridiculous word,
desire. Tu désires quelque chose?
Delete.
But they want tenderness as much as they want passion, they crave the feathered touch of softness, sweetness. They yearn—and this is what I can’t get my word processor to accept—to be fond of each other, to be charitable, to be mild and merciful. To be barefootedly beautiful in each other’s eyes.
And now, a November day, flattened by wind and worry, the trees throwing their bare branches about outside my window, I shut down my computer for the day, unwilling at this hour—five o’clock, already dark—to award them what they haven’t the wit to define.
A
T THE BEGINNING
of every month, now, I sit down at Tom’s desk and write out a cheque to the Promise Hostel in Toronto. I allow myself to weep a few moderate tears while I fold the cheque and place it in an envelope, seal it, and write out the address on Bathurst Street. Still weeping as I affix a stamp, still weeping as I walk down the road to the mailbox. The tears are in appreciation of the extreme goodness of the Anglican congregation in Toronto, who some years ago turned a neighbourhood school into a refuge for homeless people. Where did such goodness come from? I know there must have been endless committee meetings, a call for volunteers, the striking of an official board, fundraising suppers, confrontations with the city council and with the local residents—all of that inevitable paperwork and bureaucracy that goes with public-spirited projects; but where did the goodness begin, the germ of goodness, the primal thought to offer food and shelter to strangers?
Following Christ’s example, the Anglican community might say, though I doubt it, not in these ecumenical times.
Social responsibility is more likely, but even this is to delicately bracket what is, in reality, a powerful tide of virtue flowing from the veins of men and women who will not be much rewarded or even recognized for their efforts. Frances Quinn, the director, is paid, but the dormitories at the Promise Hostel are swept and swabbed by people who come and go from their offices, their professional business addresses, from million-dollar houses in Forest Hill or Rosedale or the Annex. The same people, these chanters of church litanies, also do laundry, wash windows, clean up messes of urine and vomit, and make hundreds of chicken pot pies in the immense basement kitchen.
As soon as we discovered where Norah spent her nights we went to see the place, Tom and I, along with Chris and Natalie. We phoned ahead. It was a Saturday afternoon early last May. The rain had been pouring for a week, and when we arrived downtown, two men were squatting on the second-floor roof, patching a hole. Inside, Frances Quinn was busy on the telephone, but she waved at a volunteer, a man in his fifties we guessed, to tour us around. He showed us, without the least display of hushed piety, a small chapel on the ground floor and a dormitory for twenty women, a lineup of camp beds, neatly made up, a wall of lockers, and a communal bathroom. Norah lives here, I said to myself, she sleeps in this room. A clean towel was folded over the end of each bed. The room was spotless, but dust motes nevertheless swam in
the beams of light from the windows, the kind of dust that is impossible to banish. The bare wooden floor creaked underfoot. Forty men sleep in a similar dormitory upstairs. In the basement was the dining hall and kitchen, where four women were gathered around an industrial wood-and-steel table collaborating on a list of some kind. They looked hearty, cheerful, plain, full of ease, and each wore a black barbecue apron upon which was printed the word
PROMISE
. Food donations are delivered at the rear entrance, one of them told us; today they had received a case of canned tomatoes, always welcome, and there were plenty of donations from downtown hotels and restaurants, though these tended to be last minute and required creativity on the part of the volunteer cooks who would be taking over the kitchen at four o’clock. The smell of potatoes and mould lingered in the corners of the room, but every surface was scrubbed clean. Dish detergent, or something stronger, spiked the air. The women talked about how they spent lots of time figuring out ways to freshen up day-old bread—they had a number of tricks—and for some reason this mention of freshening up bread sent them off into gales of private laughter. They pointed to the huge, recently acquired television screen in the dining hall, the gift of a major real estate dealer in the city. At six o’clock the hostel doors are opened for the evening; five o’clock in the winter months. Lights out at eleven, and everyone was expected to be out on the street by eight-thirty after a hot
breakfast. No alcohol or drugs were allowed, but of course there were those who broke the rules. Upstairs a woman was playing the piano and singing brightly: “Art thou weary, art thou languid?” She repeated these first two lines several times, practising, stopping herself, starting again. At this point Christine slipped her hand into mine, as though she were a small girl.
After the tour we walked back to where we had parked the car and got in. It was still raining. The girls, in the back seat, were silent. I couldn’t bear to turn my head and look at them. Tom sat behind the steering wheel with his seat belt on, but he didn’t start the car right away. We sat and watched the rain streaming down the windshield. We looked at the long, narrow street of houses with their tiny front yards and their blue recycling boxes. The city trees were just leafing out, that pale hazy green I love so much. I put my fingertips lightly on Tom’s knee. He moved suddenly, covering his face with his hands. Natalie in the back seat began to blub, and then we all did.
I
CONTINUE, DESPITE
everything, to work away at the novel. There are always decisions to make. Does Alicia have a dog or cat or nothing? I decide on a cat called Chestnut. An old cat with one blind eye. Alicia is not a serious ailurophile, however; she neglects Chestnut, and Chestnut knows it.
Mr. Scribano’s secretary phoned and told me in a tone of high seriousness how much they all were looking forward to seeing my manuscript and how much Mr. Scribano had been counting on it to sparkle up next year’s list. They would like to be able to mention it in the spring catalogue, just the title and a brief description. A teaser, she called it. There was no reason to fear that Mr. Scribano’s death would jeopardize such an old and well-established firm. A new editor was about to be appointed. She promised to keep me up to date.
We also continue to listen to the news. Tom and I have views about the news, which we express, even though we know how inconsequential the unfolding of political events is. People enter and exit the world; that’s the real news. The
rest is a residue, a crust left behind in the creases of the eye or mouth. The American election results have confounded everyone. In that great noisome nation the presidential decision has actually come down to two hundred people in the state of Florida. Two hundred people; they could all be crammed into the Orangetown Public Library, rubbing shoulders. How can that be? What about the proud old American constitution with its much-heralded system of checks and balances? Janet Reno appears on television and says something about how every vote really does count and this proves that democracy works. But wait a minute. It isn’t working, Ms. Reno. It’s something to talk about, all the chatter of chads and dimples. Natalie looks up chad in the dictionary, and yes, it really is there, it’s been there all along. Good Scrabble word, Chris announces.
They are both studying for exams. Just because their older sister is living the life of a derelict doesn’t mean there will be no exams. French, history, math, language arts. This is monstrous: that exams are being scheduled, that George W. Bush exists, that Mr. Scribano fell downstairs, that people are booking flights for their Christmas holidays, that Danielle Westerman accuses me of insufficient sorrow, that I am calmly wiping down the kitchen counters after a dinner of shepherds pie and spinach salad, while at the same time plotting what Alicia will say to Roman about the need to cancel the wedding, and observing that outside it is snowing
and the drifts are building thickly sculpted walls against the north side of our house, and Tom is settling down in his favourite chair with a new book on trilobites that arrived in today’s mail. The wind is blowing and blowing. I am still I, though it’s harder and harder to pronounce that simple pronoun and maintain composure.
E
ARLY ON WE THOUGHT
Norah’s problem was a boyfriend problem. And Ben Abbot really is a boy, with a boys face and gangling frame; it was this that Norah loved in the beginning, I suspect, the thoroughly innocent leanness of his shoulders, neck, the ribs bursting out above his jeans, barely covered by flesh. If he had an aura, it would be coloured by the state of beatitude. By thirty he will have acquired a supple, sexual bulk, but now he is quickness and nerve and seems always willing to be disturbed by his own body, taking its awkwardness as part of the gift of youth. I’ve never yet seen him sit back in a chair, relaxed. He perches, his eyes watchful, his mouth just a little open, a boy’s observant, greedy mouth.
We live in the age of the long childhood, and no one expects heroism from a twenty-three-year-old kid who’s still a student, who still gets monthly cheques from his parents in Sudbury, still lives in an untidy student apartment. His marks in philosophy are top notch. Harder work lies ahead, but he seems blinded by the darkness that work really
represents, and ready to delay it as long as possible with thoughts of a doctorate, then perhaps a post-doc.
He and Norah met at a friend’s party soon after she turned eighteen, and he was drawn to her at once. Norah was smart and pretty and appealing. You took one look at her and you knew she was one of the lucky people. This is how lucky people live—part of loving families, favoured by quality education, grateful rather than spoiled, able to set their references outside themselves somehow so that they escape neurosis, fixing on books or horses or basketball or piano or even cooking. Lucky people are not obliged to cultivate shrewdness. Good sense and balance belong to them naturally. When at last they encounter the sexual life, they accept it like a graft to their body, understanding at once that it is an offering and one of the greatest gifts they will be given.
Ben and Norah saw each other two or three times and then there was no separating them.
After Norah disappeared, in those frightening days in April after we found out she’d taken up daily residence at Bathurst and Bloor, I went to see Ben. Tom and I were distraught with worry, and Ben seemed the most logical person to approach. I didn’t phone ahead; I simply drove into Toronto, parked the car in a side street, and rang the buzzer of his basement apartment.
Why would a young man of twenty-three be at home in the middle of the afternoon, three o’clock? Who knows why,
but he was. He came to the door looking tousled, as though he’d been sleeping. We didn’t shake hands or embrace. We just looked into each other’s faces. Then he stepped aside awkwardly, gesturing to me, come in, come in.
A haze hung in the air, and only a little natural light entered from the tiny street-level windows. The room was timeless; it could have been a student apartment from my own generation, a place of ripped vinyl, worn chenille, posters taped to the walls, stacks of books and papers, rising stours of dust. He sank into the sagging old Salvation Army couch, rested his elbows on his knees, bringing the tips of his fingers together, those blunt, trimmed fingers that had struck me, on first meeting, as curiously carnal.