Country of Cold (5 page)

“I loved the States when I was there,” he said, sitting back down after we shook hands. “I guess she told you, I did my degree at MIT.” I nodded, smiling like a fool and taking a sip of my whiskey.

“I would have stayed but for my family, I guess. And visas were a headache in those days. Plus, she wanted to live in France.”

Her account had been pretty different.

“So, I wanted to meet you,” he said, and took a big gulp of his whiskey, looking past me, into the mirror behind the bar. He swallowed heavily and set his glass on the bar. “Because I thought it was about time we got together and talked about arrangements.”

“Why didn’t you want her to know that we were going to meet?” I asked.

“Well, you know, these things get so much more difficult if we start mixing broken hearts into all this.”

As I recounted this conversation to her that night, sitting on the Quai aux Fleurs, she laughed like an idiot, on and on: “Oh God, how foolish he can be! He’s not really so serious as he must have sounded, you know. I suppose he thought he was being adult.” She handed me the wine bottle and I tipped it to my lips. Her friend Carol, from art school, was minding Giselle, a favour they exchanged often. We had another hour.

He went on: “I guess what we should talk about is what you intend to make in the way of a commitment. I think that it should be easy to understand that I’m not prepared to keep paying the apartment rent if you are going to live there more or less permanently.”

“Sure.”

“So what sort of a commitment, exactly, are you making?”

“Uh, you know, she and I haven’t even had this conversation yet, I don’t know what answer I have for you. I don’t know what I’m going to do after my fellowship runs out. For the time being, I’m keeping my little apartment over in the seventeenth. I think that right now, we’re letting the relationship define itself.”

“That means nothing.”

I sat back in my stool and held my shoulders a little straighter. “If you say so,” I said.

“I say so.”

And it went from there.

I handed her back the wine bottle. “Basically, he told me that I was an irresponsible trifler who was toying with your affections, not that it was any business of his, but also with the affections of his daughter, and he would not allow her to be hurt and that I had better be aware of that. He knew what I was up to, he said.”

She stopped laughing. “I don’t need him to watch out for Giselle.”

“Still, I guess you can understand why he’s concerned.”

“Why?” she said.

“Uh, just that she’s, you know, his daughter, and he doesn’t know who I am or how long I’ll be here. You know.”

“Do both of you think I haven’t considered this?”

“Of course you have.”

“I can take care of us.”

“I can’t let you do that, we’ve talked about this.”

“I didn’t mean you.” She was looking at me just like her husband had.

In the Luxembourg Gardens the child and I ate
croque monsieur
and discussed the strategy of the pitchout. Her mother was off negotiating. “Basically it boils down to intuition and good communication between the catcher, the pitcher, and the first and second basemen,” I said.

“But most of the time you’re going to end up giving away a free ball,” she replied, peering across the metal table at me, squinting with the effort of trying to grasp the concept.

“Which is another reason why staying ahead in the count is so important, because of the options it gives you. And after it has worked once, for the rest of the game, the other team’s baserunners take an extra look before heading for second.”

“So it’s the fact that you might use the play that matters more than using it.” Swinging her skinny legs
under her chair, her pleated plaid skirt tucked carefully under her, not a stray crease anywhere.

“You’ve just summarized baseball strategy.”

“Will you take me to a Yankees game the next time we’re back in the States?”

“Of course.”

“When will that be, do you think?” Eyes like a hunting cat’s. Not even the suggestion of a blink.

Waiting for her after her soccer game: I had cheered my lungs out, embarrassing her mightily but no more than I had irritated the
grande dame
beside me, who had cast her mean little eyes back and forth between me and the game with a
froideur
that could freeze your heart, but it was my throat that was weak and hoarse now and the child insisted on taking me for a
limonade
on our way home.

Setting down the glasses on our little round table she asked me if I had made a decision about what I was going to do in the fall. “Not yet,” I said.

“Papa asks me that every time he talks to me.” We both nodded at that.

“It’s hard, figuring out what you can and can’t do without sometimes.”

She sipped her
limonade
, looking over her glass at me, sitting perfectly straight like no North American child not in a neck brace, and she set down the glass on the metal table and folded her hands in her lap. There was a long pause.

“Your mother will be wondering where we are.”

“Yes,” she said.

“We should go.”

“Yes,” she said.

I walked up the stairs to Leonard’s apartment building. I was nauseous. It was after nine and she hadn’t called. I had picked up the telephone four times before I decided to go over myself. Giselle had watched me leave the apartment from around the substantial waist of her Yugoslavian neighbour/landlady. Giselle didn’t say anything, she just nodded at me when I said that I wouldn’t be very long.

No answer at the heavy wooden door for a long time. And then Leonard answers, smiling and shrugging his bare shoulders. Come on in, a trace of apology at the indelicacy of the circumstances. I speak to her from the hall, standing there in my jacket. Her voice rolls around the corner, slow and guarded. He reappears in a shirt.

“So Maria will look after her for an hour or so but I said I wouldn’t be any longer than that. You might want to hurry,” I call to her around the corner.

“I was going to talk to you about this. It seemed clear to me what you wanted most,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“No hard feelings,” Leonard says from the kitchen.

When I was packing up my apartment, a mutual friend came by with a parcel. It contained two shirts I had left at her apartment. No letter. The shirts smelled like Giselle and her mother and the smell of cooking food that seeped up from the floorboards. I was gone before the cold weather came.

This was in 1992.

Cindee quit her job at the bar and announced that she was moving back out west, to Brandon, where she would study cosmetology.

She and Lester wrote to one another frequently. She found a job that she liked, Lester learned, and she was pleased that she didn’t have to work nights anymore. In the ensuing years they rarely alluded to the barrel ride, but notwithstanding the troubles the couple had had beforehand, Lester understood Sam’s death to have been Cindee’s great tragedy, her defining event.

He came to reconsider this point after she called him once late at night, drunk and angry with her current boyfriend. She was sputtering over his many shortcomings when Lester asked if any man for her would ever live up to the one she had lost. She laughed like an accordion, staccato wheezing into the telephone. He had no idea what to make of it.

Still later they met in Winnipeg, where they were both doing Christmas shopping. They ate supper together in a restaurant that revolved on top of a tower. It was very expensive but the food was quite carefully prepared. They were older and less nervous and sad than they had been. Cindee had moved on from that boyfriend, she said, still sorry about the phone call. They sat until long after the kitchen had closed. When they finally got up from their table, they had to be escorted through security. Outside they hesitated, but then caught separate taxis. Riding home, each thought about the Rushing River Waterfall and that long plunge.

Gabriella is an even six feet tall, has a nose that could split pack ice, and yearns constantly for her brother Hector. Hector is in the Argentine army, doing his obligatory service on a razor-wire-bordered base near the coast of Patagonia. Gabriella and her mother worry constantly about his catching cold; nineteen years old and surrounded by veterans of the Malvinas war, no doubt he appreciates their concern. It is on the matter of Hector only that Gabriella permits herself sentimentality—on all other topics she affects the cynicism of a big-city cop. When she speaks she leans forward, to put shoulder behind her words. She smokes foul-smelling South American cigarettes and tells bawdy
jokes when she drinks pastis. She maybe drinks too much pastis.

Felicinada is only slightly shorter but much better humoured than Gabriella. She dresses always in yellow and has the largest collection of Xavier Cugat records in the world. When I had chicken pox last year she made me tomato soup every day for a week. They both work around the corner at the Café Kiev. They live above me and make an astonishing amount of noise. Felicinada, I think, wears high heels from the moment she gets up to when she goes to bed again. They are given to vacuuming at three in the morning, and inevitably they are
aficionadas
of the rumba. You can imagine.

“ ‘So look here, my little
machito,
’ I says to him, ‘you ask me for a Caesar salad. I bring you a Caesar salad. And now you won’t pay for it because I didn’t tell you it had anchovies in it.
Caesar salads have anchovies in them
. I’m sorry if you’re lacto-ovulating these days but you still ordered the such-and-such salad and you’re gonna pay for it.’ ” This is Gabriella. It is two in the afternoon and she is sitting on my couch and reading a fashion magazine. I can just see her through the crack in the bathroom door. Neither of us has seen Felicinada for three days. She has taken a lover and Gabriella is feeling a little abandoned. I can smell coffee brewing. I am in the tub, enveloped in bubbles.

I met Gabriella the week I moved into this apartment. The first night I slept here I awoke at four in the
morning to the sound of running water coming from my bathroom. I sat up among the pillars of cartons all around me and listened. There was water splashing and there was humming. I paused outside the door and then edged it open slowly. “What sort of apartment is this,” I remember wondering, in awe, “that comes with coffee-skinned amazons who bathe in your bathtub in the early morning?” And then our eyes met and we shrieked; she, rising up in the water and grabbing a back brush—
my
back brush—to serve as a club; me, slamming the door and leaping back. Through the suddenly latched, bolted, and leaned-against door, we established that she lived above me but that she didn’t have a bathtub, only a shower, and that she had come to an agreement with her friend Susan, who had lived here before me and who worked nights, that she could use the tub anytime she wished before 8 a.m.; she hadn’t realized Susan had left.

I, ever the agreeable one, suggested she carry on as she had with Susan. She snorted loudly at that. But she finished her bath and left with a nod. A month would pass—of observation? assessment?—before I would hear splashing in the night again and soon we were friends.

“Robert, your toast is getting cold,” she calls. “You’ll turn into a little squid if you don’t hurry up.”

She has croissants from the bakery, grapefruit juice, the toast and cereal with fresh fruit waiting—clearly an
observer of the Most Important Meal dictum. She pours me coffee as I sit down. “Gabriella, this is great.”

“Eat your food before it gets cold.”

“Mmmmmggruph.”

“Charlie has been getting worse lately,” she says absently, as she picks up her magazine again. Charlie is the building superintendent. He lives across the hall from me, is married to a woman we all call Saint Dorothy, and wears silk suits and shoes that gleam like good intentions. He plays the cornet, or did once, and sometimes you can hear “Moon River” drifting through the hallways with the visceral poignancy of late-night television and too many mai tais. This despite the fact that when sober he prosecutes the noise-abatement bylaws like his personal
jihad
.

“Worse how?”

“Last night I’m just getting ready to go to work and he knocks on the door and he wants to know if the apartment needs any domestic maintenance to be done. That’s what he said, ‘domestic maintenance.’ I said, ‘It looks to me like you’re more dressed to go meringue the night away than you are to be fixin’ taps.’ He bows to me and offers his arm and says, ‘Whatever señorita wishes.’ ‘Charlie,’ I say, ‘I’d rather stick needles in my eyes than go dancing wit’ you.’ He says, ‘Hard to get—that’s a Latin thing, isn’t it?’ ”

“Leapin’ lizards.”

“Men are beasts. All except my brother, Hector.”

This is Gabriella’s construct of the world: at the centre lies Hector, herself, and, when she’s not off with some new dalliance, Felicinada. This is the limit of presumed good. In successive layers outward lie Carmen Miranda films, expensive outerwear, and her pastis. After that, pretty much everything is at least suspect. Way out in the stratosphere, even beyond her job at the Café Kiev and dental work, are men who use hair care products, stand too close, and never stop smiling even when they speak.

The front door swings open. In walk the prodigal roommate and a man who wears a torn and spattered tuxedo. “Hi guys,” Felicinada says, then, nodding at the man in the mayonnaise stains, “this is Peter, he missed his train. He came up here last week for his cousin’s wedding and we’ve been hanging around ever since.” Peter is maybe twenty-eight. Peter is ignored. Gabriella continues reading her fashion magazine. Pointedly.

“Hi, Gabriella,” Felicinada ventures. Something is said quickly in Spanish, in reply. There is a pause. Felicinada tightens her lips.

“Nice to meet you, Peter,” I say.

Felicinada smiles at me and leads Peter away from the door. “How are things?” she says to me. Peter takes up a station beside the window, hands stuck deep in his tuxedo trousers. Felicinada sits down on the couch beside Gabriella, facing me.