Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth (24 page)

“You see me as the dream interpreter?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Well, what’s the dream?” She leaned on the arm of her chair and gazed at me attentively. With her blue eyes and aquiline nose and her regal posture, she could have been posing for a court portrait.

“I’m in this small movie theatre, I’m the only one there, and this movie comes on—there’s this operating table, except it’s very long, it goes on and on. First what you see on it are instruments and vague sorts of bits that could be parts of the insides of creatures. Then you see a dead bird that’s been gutted out, then a mammal, and a bigger mammal. Each one is higher on the evolutionary scale. And then right at the end there’s a fox on the table, and its insides are spilled out, and then I see myself, I’m on the table, and I’ve been gutted out too. Only I have blonde hair instead of red. And then the title of the movie comes on and it’s called
The Fox
.”

“Like the short story by Lawrence?”

“I guess. Only I haven’t read that story. All I read was
Sons and Lovers
. So, do you know what the dream means?”

“Well, how did you feel watching the movie?”

“Curious. It isn’t scary. Whoever gutted these creatures hasn’t hurt them, they were already dead.”

“I think you wish to have courage. You don’t want to be gutless. You don’t mind being foxy. And you want to have fun, like in the television commercial, ‘Is it true blondes have more fun?’ That’s my guess, but it’s only a guess. Really I’d have to know more about you.”

“Thanks,” I said. It was hard to tell with Dr. Moore, but I had the distinct feeling that she didn’t like me. “You know, Anthony was my counsellor—did he tell you?”

“Your counsellor at that camp?”

“Yeah, he was really good. Everyone loved him.”

“Oh?” Dr. Moore’s smile was partly diffident, partly pleased, the smile of an adult opening a birthday gift. Then I saw that she was trembling slightly. I was shocked, and thought I’d misperceived some small movement, but no, her entire body was trembling. I remembered Gerald’s letter and felt abashed.

“He was great. We adored him.” But I added, stupidly, “He made us laugh,” and ruined everything. Her smile faded into covert disappointment, an acknowledgment of Anthony’s failings, or maybe his unhappiness, which she’d known about all along. Not her son the beloved but her son the clown. Like Patrick, she shut down, and the trembling ceased.

Patrick had had enough. He got up and left the room.

I waved idiotically to Dr. Moore and followed him. “‘ Gimme shelter,’” I sang under my breath as we returned to Patrick’s lair.

I sat on Patrick’s ugly kitchen chair, shut my eyes, breathed in deeply, exhaled. For the first time in weeks, I wasn’t about to blow a fuse or go to war with a jammed zipper. The monkey was on Patrick’s back. It had been there all along, of course, but I only saw it now, and somehow it made mine superfluous. I had witnessed a scene as unruly and peculiar as any in my own home. With a gift of this magnitude, I no longer had any urge to lash out.

There were two knocks on the door, followed by the sound of footsteps quickly retreating, clomp clomp clomp, down the stairs. The knocks were Mr. Davies’s signal that food had been set out in the kitchen. “Why is he running away?” I asked.

“He doesn’t want anyone to expect him to talk.”

“I guess your mom doesn’t like to cook?”

“She’s into food. He makes things like partridges for her.”

Mr. Davies had left a vegetarian lasagne and a mushroom pie downstairs on the kitchen table—both culinary masterpieces, as anyone could see. Yet as far as Patrick was concerned, they might
have been scraps left for stray animals. He heaped a mid-sized serving of each dish onto a plate and, still standing, ate so rapidly and blindly that he seemed to be neither chewing nor swallowing. It was as if he had shut himself down again, had cancelled the very act of eating. I’d never seen anything like it. Even Bubby, with her deliberate efficiency, was a
gourmande
next to Patrick. “Well, see you upstairs,” he said, when he’d finished. He dropped his plate in the sink and left me alone with my meal.

I, on the other hand, was in food heaven. Mr. Davies was brilliant, no doubt about it. I stuffed myself until I was bursting at the seams, then made my way back upstairs.

Patrick was kneeling on the living-room rug, setting a lit match to the bowl of a gold water pipe. The pipe was too pretty, I felt, to be taken seriously—it looked more like a trinket or a toy.
Go ask Alice …
if a caterpillar in a children’s book could puff on something like this, so could I. But as soon as I tasted the bitter smoke I pushed the thin tube away, grimacing. It was too late. A procession of dream images floated before me: my mother bouncing and pouncing like a deranged human strapped to a flying machine, Vera Moore slyly quoting bits of Hegel as she plunged her fork into Mr. Davies’s partridges, Mr. Michaeli wilting under paper airplanes. Rosie in a white sari, pretending to be dead on a bed of Archie comics.

“You should be nicer to your mother,” I said. “Though who am I to talk?”

“I’m very nice to her,” Patrick replied, as if amused to find himself wrongfully accused. The opium had driven away his anger, and suddenly he reminded me of Anthony. Anthony did the same thing—spoke elliptically, humorously—the only difference was the aggression. Patrick had it, Anthony didn’t.

“Did you know your father wrote about your mother’s past in a notebook?”

Patrick seemed to be half-asleep: his legs were stretched out in front of him on the carpet, and he was leaning against the sofa
cushions, his head tilted back, his eyes shut. “Yes,” he said. “The famous notebook.”

“Did you read it?”

“No, and I never will. I’m phobic about things like that.”

“Yeah, me too,” I said, and at that moment I felt close to Patrick, and I wanted to squeeze his hand, but he would have pulled away, and that realization pushed the moment aside.

I don’t know how long I stayed there, sprawled in the armchair, staring into space. When it was time to go, I offered to take the bus home.

“No, no,” Patrick said, pulling himself up. “I’ll drive you.”

“Are you hallucinating?” I asked.

He gave a stoned laugh. “It takes more than this.”

The next day I returned to St. Mary’s with a contrite heart. My unwinding was now in its last stages and like a spinning top rocking unsteadily to a halt, I felt slightly off-balance as I slowed down.

“I’m starving,” Rosie said, as soon as she saw me.

“So am I. And I finished all my soda crackers on the bus. Sorry!”

“Wait here—I’ll see what I can find at the cafeteria.”

There were several other visitors in the waiting room, all of them silent and glum and in a state of contained tension, as if their clothes were scratchy and the air was too dry. I began to feel suffocated by their presence, so I strolled down the hallway, checked in on Mr. Michaeli.

He had a private room—I suppose the bed situation in hospitals was not as dire forty years ago. He appeared to be sleeping, but the heavy door creaked as I pulled it back, and he opened his eyes. His lips curved into his familiar disconcerting smile, tenuous and dismissive. “Ah, Maya! How are you, our good friend, Maya? Every time I see you, I forget how tall you are and how long is your hair. I knew once a girl with such red hair as yours. We called her Lita. She’s dead, unfortunately.”

“What exactly is wrong with you?” I asked him.

“What’s wrong, what’s wrong, who knows! The doctors like to invent problems. Everywhere they look, they see a problem. Kidney, problem. Heart, problem. Stomach, problem.”

“My father’s lungs were damaged in the war.”

“So far, they have not found a lung problem. Maybe if we give them another week.”

“You’re the opposite of a hypochondriac.”

“That means?”

“Someone who thinks something’s always wrong with them. Like in that play by Molière.”

“Ah, Molière. When I was a boy, my father took me to Molière. And now here I am speaking to you in a hospital in Canada about Molière. And my father is dead. In German we saw it, or maybe in Yiddish. Yiddish theatre was big business. Let me tell you, Jews love plays. Too bad we ended up attending the worst play in history.”

“Who cares,” I said, and instantly—for the first time—I regretted the heartless dismissal, but the words were out and they hung in the air like glass birds.

“I agree. Some things are too far from the mind to understand.”

I walked to the window and looked down. Tiny toy people, tiny toy cars.

“Maya, come here. This is not your problem. And your mother, I saw her on a date. She is—how did my little Rosie say—courted? By a very nice man. They were in a restaurant holding hands.”

“My mother!”

“And for who you think she wears that perfume? For you?”

“I can’t believe it.”

“We all saw, and my Rosie said, wouldn’t Maya be surprised. And I say, better not tell, it could be a secret. But now out of the bag I spill the beans.”

I tried to picture it—my mother and a suitor, at a restaurant, holding hands. What most startled me was that my mother could
keep something to herself. I had not thought her capable of even the smallest subterfuge, this woman who recounted to anyone who would listen her close calls with reckless drivers and rancid butter. Not to mention the ongoing forays into a disjointed alternate universe.

And of course, beyond that, what man would choose to spend time with a woman most people crossed the street to avoid?

“What’s he like?” I asked.

“They were speaking Yiddish. Maybe in Yiddish your mother is more herself. He was dressed well, in a suit and tie. His shoes were shiny. I would say he is a quiet man.”

A quiet man! Well, he’d have to be, wouldn’t he?

A nurse peeped in, nodded cryptically, disappeared.

All at once, in a surge of irritation and disgust, Mr. Michaeli said, “My wife and daughter don’t want to let me go. Already in the Red Cross I was ready to die, but my wife insists for her sake I live. Why this fear? Death, you know, is nothing. But Gitte believes in getting back. Showing them you won. So here I am, waiting for my gold medal.”

“They love you,” I said.

But his outburst had exhausted him. “Yes, yes,” he said, his voice retreating. “Love we definitely have.” He shut his eyes; he wanted me to leave.

It seems we have countless ways of knowing—we surmise; we half-know; we know and don’t know—and everything between. With dismaying clarity, Mr. Michaeli had spelled it out for me: Rosie’s project was to offer compensation for her father’s suffering by means of her talent for happiness, while Mr. Michaeli’s project was to satisfy Rosie and Mrs. Michaeli by staying alive.

“I’ll wait outside,” I whispered. I wasn’t sure whether he could still hear me.

I returned to the waiting room and considered the news of my mother’s secret courtship. In fact, it made sense: for the past few months she’d been taking off several times a week, right after
dinner. If before Mr. Michaeli’s revelation I thought about these excursions with anything other than relief, I must have supposed that my mother’s circle of card-players was expanding.

She had also made herself some new outfits recently: a sequined black dress, a white jacket with a purple collar. Her soft cherubic knees were now in view; her lipstick was palest pink. Wandering into her room one evening I had come across a paperback entitled, remarkably,
How to Massage Your Man
. All the same, it hadn’t crossed my mind that in the real world there might be a man for her to massage. I was accustomed to thinking of my mother as sole inhabitant of a microcosm that no one could alter, and that, therefore, no one could enter.

I felt betrayed, until it occurred to me that an entire area of discourse was in fact consistently absent from my mother’s fractured soliloquies. The taboo subject wasn’t sex; on the contrary, when free love was celebrated as a revolutionary concept I thought both its proponents and its critics were strangely obsessive.

Rather, it was the future that, apart from generalized presentiments of disaster, was missing from our lives. I’d never heard my mother mention prospects or plans; we avoided discussing even the week ahead, never mind the broader outlines of hope and desire. I once showed my poor mother a photograph of mirrors reflecting each other to infinity. I was fascinated by the photo: we humans were truly amateurs, incapable even of grasping a concept as basic as endlessness. But Fanya covered her eyes and backed away—
don’t don’t show me already I am dizzy—

It was not, therefore, a polite Russian man my mother was hiding; it was what he might be planning for the two of them.

I leaned my head against the wall and stared at the fluorescent lights.
Titorelli … Titorelli …
I was a frequent patron of the Verdi, a repertory cinema on St. Laurent Street that ignored the censorship board’s eighteen-and-over age restrictions. I enjoyed it all: the good, the bad, and the sexist. David Hemmings’s libidinous camera
and gestalt investigations in
Blowup
; Rita Tushingham wide-eyed and overwhelmed in
The Knack
; circus burlesque and hat fetishes in Fellini’s
Juliet of the Spirits
. Other movies educated me: the focus on cunnilingus in some obscure Swedish film was particularly illuminating. And if I had trouble falling asleep at night, I had only to think of Romy Schneider displaying her webbed fingers to Josef K and asking,
Has she any physical defect
? or recall the mad, lascivious laughter of the wild girls who reached out through bamboo bars and cried out,
Titorelli, Titorelli …
and I’d drift off.

I drifted off now in the waiting room chair, and in Proustian pre-sleep I reconstructed the words
tinker tailor soldier sailor
according to shape and size and colour. I had a confused notion that when I graduated I’d find a job diving underwater in search of people who had lost their vision by drowning. I’d bring them to shore and teach them Braille.

By the time Rosie returned from the cafeteria I was wide awake. She handed me a container of rice pudding and a plastic spoon.