Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth (17 page)

“Yes, she told me about him.”

“She tells everyone.”

“If you could change her, would you change what she says, or how much she says?”

I liked the question. “It’s what she says. I don’t mind that she talks a lot. Sometimes she’s funny, and then it’s okay.”

“And when she’s not funny?”

“Oh, who cares!” I rotated the chair, a full circle this time, and passed the wooden puzzle from hand to hand. Neither of us spoke for a few minutes. I liked Dr. Moore’s unhurried pace, her equanimity. “She’s just a fake,” I said.

“She’s putting on an act?”

“I can’t explain. She doesn’t do it on purpose.”

“What about school?”

“I’m a problem student,” I said proudly.

She smiled again. “Are you?”

“Yes. Apart from when I have Miss d’Arcy. She used to be a nun, I think. Now she teaches Geography. She’s nice.”

“And when teachers aren’t nice, you refuse to be afraid.”

“That’s right! Why should I be afraid?”

“What about friends?”

“She has her friends. They play cards.”

“I meant your friends.”

“Oh. I don’t have any real friends. Like that song, sometimes I feel like a motherless child.”

“Maybe sometimes you
wish
you were a motherless child!” she said playfully.

“No, it’s bad enough being fatherless.”

“I think your mother said you just had a birthday?”

“Yes, two weeks ago. I turned twelve.”

“And how did you celebrate?”

“Just the usual. Cake, candles, with one for good luck. My mother got me art postcards from the museum. I like art.”

“Do you?”

“I like paintings that make you wonder what the story is. I like the watercolour in your waiting room.”

“What’s the story there?”

“Half one thing, half something else.”

She nodded. “Well, Maya. I’ll tell you what I think. Do you want to hear?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, I do.”

“Here’s what I think. I think your mother is presenting events in a very confusing way. That’s how she copes. I don’t know your mother, or how she thinks. I’m guessing that a part of her is living in the past, in the war. So you have two mothers. One is here, and one is
there
.”

“Just my luck,” I said, wondering how much Dr. Moore knew about
there
.

This time her smile was accompanied by a small, light laugh, and I joined in. She was easy to please.

“Maybe we can work on ways to make things easier for you.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll talk to your mother.”

I nodded, though I wasn’t optimistic—and I was right: our first meeting with Vera Moore was also our last. In a separate conversation Dr. Moore offended my mother, and she became, in my mother’s repertoire, Dr. Know-It-All or That Czech Woman.

And possibly in defiance of Dr. Know-It-All, my mother decided that I was a paragon of mental health after all. When her
card-playing friends came to our house that Wednesday, she summoned me for display.

—mamaleh come here come I want to show you to my friends—

I stood at the entrance to the living room and Bubby lurked behind me with a towel. I took the towel from her and, impersonating Lawrence of Arabia, draped it on my head. My mother burst out laughing.

—you see you see what a flower I have—

And now, two years later, here I was, on Dr. Know-It-All’s doorstep. Vera Moore was Patrick’s mother.

It wasn’t so unusual, in fact, that sort of interconnection. Suspicions ran high among our parents: even in Canada, who could you trust, really? Only someone who had passed the test of multiple customers, someone who
came recommended
. And so we all ended up with the same optometrists and dry cleaners, the same music teachers and psychiatrists.

For a second I didn’t know why Patrick’s mother seemed familiar. Then I remembered Dr. Moore’s penetrating blue eyes, the sense she gave you that she knew interesting things which would be difficult to explain, though she was willing to try. She recognized me as well—my height and sprawling red hair gave me away. She was puzzled by our appearance on her doorstep, but she smiled with tentative cordiality. Maybe she thought we were selling Girl Guide cookies. “Yes, can I help you?”

“I’m Rosie Michaeli—you know, the piano teacher’s daughter. And this is Maya. Is Patrick here?”

I could see Patrick’s mother trying to hide her delight. Patrick had visitors—and girls! “Please, come in,” she said, furtively observing us. “I’ll let him know you’re here.” She shut both the outside door and the vestibule door; she was eager to see the visit consummated. Abraham and God’s messengers. Lot and the two angels.

She lifted the receiver of a push-button phone and dialled. Rosie and I exchanged glances, not only because Patrick had his own line but because we’d never seen a push-button phone before.

“Patrick? You have guests … yes, they’ve asked for you … yes, I’m sure.”

I’d never heard anyone address their child, or any family member, that way—with a kind of placid formality, a carefully rationed readiness to please, as if Patrick were a distinguished guest who’d come to dinner.

We hung our coats on wooden hangers. From the end of the hallway, hands in pockets, Patrick slouched towards us.

“Oh, hi,” he said. “Would you like to come up?”

He was struggling. The problem, I gathered, was that he believed in camaraderie in principle, but the principle was at odds with his personality.

“We’d love to,” Rosie answered.

Blindly, as if walking through a cave or tunnel, Patrick led us past gleaming surfaces, sandstone sculptures, an indoor fountain, humid clay pots of cyclamen on blue-and-orange ceramic tiles.
This is the house that Vera built
: a house made of marble and polished wood, satin and silk, a house designed for creature comforts. Yet somehow it all fell flat. Dr. Moore had courageously chosen the furniture, the tiles, the plants, but the end result was someone else’s set—a set that was as recalcitrant in its way as the Michaeli home, and as disjointed.

We followed Patrick to the kitchen, where, to our confusion, he walked into a pantry. There was an unpainted wooden door inside, camouflaged by shelves of assorted jars and tin boxes. Patrick opened the door and disappeared up a narrow, unlit stairwell. Once upon a time, these must have been the back stairs to the maids’ quarters. Rosie and I held on to the walls as we climbed up after him. “What is this, the secret lair of the Marquis de Sade?” I asked.

“Oh, is it too dark for you?”

“No, no, we love not being able to see two inches ahead of us.”

“Maya’s a riot,” Rosie said, protective of both me and Patrick.

“Sorry. Here…” He pushed open a door at the top of the staircase and a shaft of light filtered down on us. Like his mother, who
had shut both entrance doors to prevent us from escaping, Patrick needed two barricades to prevent people from entering.

We stepped into the kitchen of an attic apartment. There was no foyer or hallway, and the rooms opened onto one another like cars in a train: kitchen, bedroom, living room—not ahead of us, but to our right.

The kitchen was in a farcical state of disarray. The floor was strewn with several strata of empty takeout containers, muddy pizza flyers, alleyway bottles, discarded cigarette packs. There were only two items of furniture in the room other than the fridge: a glass-topped table and an exceptionally ugly high-backed chrome and vinyl chair, its yellowish brown padding tacked into place by rows of metal studs. Tall mounds of coagulated coins rose from the table like hills in an architect’s table model; no doubt they’d come into being by way of the big bang, or little clink, of the male pocket-emptying ritual.

“I see you’re really into housekeeping,” I said. “But then, you don’t have Bubby Miriam to tidy up.”

Rosie smiled. She understood that I was deliberately trespassing, understood that the preliminary platitudes which served as safety nets for most people made Patrick nervous. The only solution was to charge through intimacy as if through some cosmic black hole and emerge on the other side. A foreboding of what might come to pass was replaced by the fiction that everything had already taken place.

“Is it that bad?” He looked around dubiously.

“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a chair this ugly,” I said. “You could have nightmares about a chair like this.”

Patrick gazed at the chair as though he were noticing it for the first time.

“Where did you find it?” I asked.

“The builders left it behind. Some builders came to change the windows or something … I don’t see what’s wrong with it.”

“Liar,” I said, and Patrick laughed. A voiceless, breathy sort of chugging sound, but unmistakably a laugh.

Forging a path through the trash on the floor, I entered Patrick’s bedroom. A piece of black fabric, cut at a slant and reverting to threads along the sides, had been fastened with thumbtacks to the window frame, and there was also, I realized, a dog with long fleecy ears on the bed, partly concealed by the rumpled blankets. The dog peered at us with expressive eyes.

The bedroom was in the same state as the kitchen. The bed didn’t have a headboard, and I noticed a dark patch on the wall where Patrick presumably leaned his head while reading. The desk looked like a rummage-sale table à la Miss Havisham: under a coating of dust lay a ship in a bottle, the Eiffel Tower in a snow globe, a pair of Buddy Holly glasses, a broken radio, a backgammon set, a model airplane and I can’t remember what else. The only articles apparently in commission were a harmonica and a bottle of painkillers. The bottle had been tucked inside the airplane, on the pilot’s seat.

“Codeine…” I examined the pills. “I take codeine for migraines. Sort of migraines—I don’t know exactly what they are. Is that why you have them?”

“No—those are from when I fell off my bike and bashed my knee.”

“How did you fall?” Rosie asked.

“A car backed into me.”

“How awful!”

“Yes, very awful,” Patrick echoed satirically, detaching himself from everything—the accident, the pain, Rosie’s commiseration.

“I see you have two pillows,” I said. “You have girls up here?”

“No, no … well, once…”

“Once, you had a girlfriend, or once, someone came here?”

“Once, someone came here. She got locked out of her apartment…”

“Who was she?”

“Comrade Cynthia,” he said. “She hates me now.”

“Comrade Cynthia! What are you, some sort of communist?”

“Yeah, I’m a Party member.” His tone was skeptical, though whether he was being skeptical about himself or the Party, or both, I couldn’t tell.

“Why does Comrade Cynthia hate you?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s a long, humiliating story.”

“And what about this harmonica, do you play?”

“Not really … but Woofie likes the sound, he sings along. One of the few things he still does, other than eat and sleep. Isn’t that right, Woofie?” And without warning, he stepped into another persona. He stroked Woofie, murmured endearments without a hint of inhibition. Then it was over, and he was flung back like the rebel angels into the thorny human world. He rose from the bed and suggested we move to the living room.

Patrick’s living room was an extension not of the unholy mess but of the soulful cuddle with Woofie. Here, in who knew what surge of duty and hope, he’d assembled a sofa with wooden armrests, two matching armchairs, a braided rug, bookcases, a stereo system, and, near the window, three thriving floor plants with enormous jungle leaves. These gestures, like the cuddle, modified but did not entirely negate the general atmosphere of edgy, fatalistic solitude.

“Who chose this furniture?” I asked.

“I guess I did.”

“That’s kind of heartbreaking,” I said.

“Very heartbreaking. What can I get you to drink? Coffee—something stronger? Vodka?”

Rosie and I burst into childish laughter, which made Rosie snort accidentally, which made us laugh even harder. I wasn’t allowed to drink coffee at home, and our Friday-night bottle of wine usually lasted several weeks. There was a prehistoric bottle of whisky under the sink at Rosie’s; we once poured a little into a glass, tasted a drop, and yelped hilariously as we spit it out.

“What is it?” Patrick asked.

“I’ll have what you’re having,” I said.

“Are you sure? I’m having vodka. I could make you a screwdriver.”

“What’s that?”

“Vodka and orange juice.”

“Why do drinks have such weird names?” I asked him.

“Do they?”

“Any sort of juice or cola for me, please,” Rosie said.

“What was so funny? Why were you laughing just now?”

“We were remembering when we tried some whisky. We don’t usually drink,” I said. “We’re too young.”

“You don’t have to. I mean … if you don’t want to.”

“Patrick! Don’t drive us crazy.”

Rosie handed him the plastic bag we’d brought with us. “By the way, you left your stuff at Daddy’s.”

“In case you’re wondering why we’re here,” I added.

“Oh … thanks.” He dropped the bag carelessly on the floor and left in search of drinks. He returned a few minutes later with a bottle of vodka, a jug of vodka and orange juice, a carton of pear juice, and three somewhat greasy glasses.

Patrick sat on the sofa, and Rosie and I settled into the armchairs. He poured pear juice into one glass, the vodka and orange juice mix into another. “‘ I had a little nut tree, nothing would it bear,’” Rosie sang softly. “‘ But a silver nutmeg and a golden pear.’”

Patrick downed his vodka, which he was drinking straight, in one shot.

“That was fast,” I said.

My strategy of trashing small talk was working, as was the vodka: Patrick smiled and a measure of strain moved away, improving his appearance. His smile was unexpectedly sweet, a smile left over from childhood, trusting and happy. “Sorry about the mess. I’m not used to guests,” he said.

“Why?” I asked. “Why don’t you have more friends?”

“I don’t like situations I can’t control.”

“‘I who abandon what I can’t control, first the people I know, eventually my own soul,’” I quoted. I swirled my vodka and orange juice; I was finding it difficult to overlook the greasy residue on the rim.