Crossings (38 page)

Edna says to Mik, ‘Look. It's hard enough on her. Leave her alone, why can't you? Can't you see she's upset as it is?'

‘What's
she
upset about?' Mik says.

‘Men!' Edna says.

Walking back to my place, Edna says, ‘Do you believe him? About getting married?'

‘Why would he lie about that?'

Like Jocelyn about clerkship, I can't imagine why anyone would lie about the state of marriage. One might admit it, but
lie!

 

AND IT IS over. Only of course it isn't.

One day, two years later, coming back from the clinic, I stop at an East Hastings café and here's Mik.

‘You've put on weight.'

‘Yes. How are you?'

‘Okay.'

‘How's married life?'

‘Great.'

‘It seems to agree with you.'

‘So. How are you, Vicky?'

‘I'm all right. I don't remember you ever saying my name before.'

‘We're older.'

‘Yes. I'm thirty.'

‘Yah. We're older.'

He is working at a warehouse on Delta Island. He'd like to show it to me. I say all right and we go, driving in an old clunker. He's a watchman. He shows me the warehouse, and then we drive back. It's night time now. He drives me to the top of Burnaby Mountain and shows me the lights of the city. He kisses me. But I say I want to go home.

That's all. Except I give him my telephone number.

And I go to Berkeley.

While Edna is working and Sam is seeing his analyst, I wash and scrub and scour their basement suite. I cook immense meals, and buy place mats for the table.

Edna says, ‘I can't stand it, Vicky. You're just like my mother.'

So I take the bus to Sausalito. I buy a book and a pair of black pants, with those awful elastic things for under the feet. And an orange sweater. I eat lunch at a swanky restaurant. I buy a peace button. I get on the bus to go back to Berkeley.

The book is
Big Sur
by Kerouac.

I'm sitting there, in the back seat of the bus, the paper bag with the slacks and sweater on the seat beside me. The bus has stopped and I look up and see him. Standing at the front of the bus. Looking down toward the end. I shift my paper bag to my lap.

I recognize him instantly. My Mexican doctor.

He sits beside me. He looks at the book. He says, ‘Not so good as his first.'

He asks me if I'd like to have a beer when we get to Berkeley. I say, All right.

He looks at me as if I'm lying.

We sit under a trellis of vine leaves. They are real. We have beers poured from a large pitcher. He asks would I like to see Haight-Ashbury tomorrow.

I say, All right.

Of course he isn't my Mexican doctor.

The next day, at three o'clock in the afternoon, I get pregnant. On Russian Hill. He takes me to the Berkeley bus. He buys me a ticket. He kisses me goodbye. I never see him again. We write letters. I will write and tell him all about the friendly advice I am getting. Iris and the knitting needles.

I will take a break from all this. I will tell the story about Iris and the knitting needles. I will sell my soul for a good joke.

I have gone to an intellectual gathering in the professor's West End apartment. The day Jack Kennedy died. We all sit around in various stages of shock. I say something about a conspiracy, and the professor gets furious. It wasn't a conspiracy, it was one lunatic, alone. People see conspiracies under beds. It's an American disease to see conspiracy. I am wearing the green velvet dress with the cape. A lovely deep emerald green, and the cape is lined with gold.

We talk about it. How the children have been given a day off from school and how they are pleased with this, a holiday. We talk of someone who said, ‘Who will be our president now? The man with the barbecue handshake?' It is a good image, someone says. The barbecue handshake.

I'd been lying in bed when the news came through. Then the soap opera came on again. The programming went on as usual, an American channel. Until after one o'clock in the afternoon. Brief news flashes through the inane bright chatter of a woman's show. She was reeling it off, some nonsense about a flower show, as if it had been pre-recorded in her head; but her eyes were mad.

It seemed too much to bear, that terror and my own as well. For I was afraid.

I had been lying in bed because I didn't want to get up. I didn't want to know all over again what I already knew. There would be no blood. I was really pregnant.

The professor asked me to stay behind, after the others left. He made me a drink. He said how was I. I said, pregnant.

‘You. Every time I see you, you're into something.'

A couple of days later, he phoned. Iris could help me.

I don't know what I expected. Advice on motherhood perhaps? I go there one bright morning, the air crisp and cool and smoky. And Iris delivers her lecture on Planned Parenthood and the Knitting Needle.

‘You take a catheter tube. You can get them in Woodward's. And you put the knitting needle inside. This protects the uterus from the actual tip, you see. You don't actually touch the uterus with the knitting needle. Just a plastic knitting needle, thirty-nine cents a pair. It stiffens the catheter tube. The prairie farm wives showed me. They've used this method for years. You just introduce air, you see.'

‘Isn't there a danger of haemorrhage?'

‘You have to take that risk if you really want to get rid of it. Look, I've done it thousands of times. Well, hundreds. It's worth the risk, isn't it? Are you surprised? Did you think I was faithful to him?'

One of the apocryphal stories about Iris is that she has said, ‘I've always enjoyed sex with my husband. Every one of the sixty seconds.'

‘But Iris, you see, I did it accidentally on purpose.' This is the first time I am to say it. It is my story and I will stick to it.

‘You mean, you're going to keep it?'

‘Yes.'

She says then that she thinks it's wonderful, all power to me. But last New Year's, across an academic party, she calls, in her high carrying voice, ‘Aren't you glad you kept it after all?'

The Nut Lady said, ‘How are you going to foul things up?'

I am surprised. ‘You don't think I'm mad?'

‘No. You've done it half-way. Really, it's a victory. You're almost ready to leave.'

‘I'm cured?'

‘You want a certificate?' She looks tired.

‘You think I'm going to foul it up?'

‘Oh yes.'

‘Yes,' I say. ‘I guess I already have. I write clever letters.'

‘I bet you do.'

‘Maybe I don't want to get married.'

She laughs.

‘I write and say, It's fine, I can Handle It Myself.'

‘I bet you do.'

‘It's like, you see, there was this woman, she slept with Zeus. I can't remember her name. But he comes to her as a man. And she isn't satisfied. She asks him to come to her in the full glory of his godhood. And when he does, she's fried to a crisp. Only with me, it's just the opposite. I'm afraid … I don't want to know anything about him. I want him to stay right where he is. I don't want him to tell me his troubles, or his failures, or his … I don't want to know. I want to be able, always, to say, It was a miracle. Do you see?'

She sighs. ‘Yes.'

‘A mysterious stranger, a god burnt black from the sun. Not Icarus.'

She says something.

‘What?'

‘I said, Icarus?'

‘Flew too close to the sun. He was human.' I am still hearing myself. What I've said. ‘His wings melted and he fell.'

‘But you already know,' she says. ‘You already know a lot about him.'

‘Yes.' But I am to deny it. I am to deny it for years. Even to myself. Most of all.

One night Mik phones me and I say blithely, ‘Guess what? I'm preggers.'

This has become my story. I am gay, blithe, unconcerned. It is all wonderful, wonderful, I couldn't be happier. In the mornings I brush my teeth and say
Courage
with a French accent. I am both terrified and yet, oddly, superbly unconcerned. I know if I just hang in there, it's going to be all right. I say that to myself: It's going to be all right, kid.

Mik says, ‘Who's the father?'

‘I met him in San Francisco. On a bus.'

‘What's he like?'

‘Tall and dark, and very nice. He doesn't know.' A lie.

Except by this time I believe it.

We chat for a few minutes and I ask him how his wife is, and then we say goodbye amicably.

A knock comes at the door. It is Mik.

We play chess. I beat him.

‘You're not concentrating,' I say.

‘Out of practice,' he says.

‘Doesn't your wife play chess?'

He looks at me. ‘I never got married.'

I knew of course.

Then, ‘What do you mean, “dark?”' he says.

I tell him.

He says, ‘And you said I left
my
shit in you.' He gets up and begins to walk around the room, swinging his arms.

‘Oh Mik, don't be obstreperous.'

‘“Obstreperous!”'

‘No, really, I must be very calm and very quiet. People mustn't make a fuss around me. I have to take care of myself.'

He goes out into the kitchen and after a moment, he leaves. The door slams.

He passes by under my window, in the alley that runs between the two old tenement houses. And he shouts up at me: ‘Nigger lover.'

In a way it is a gift.

After the baby comes, I am swamped with bills. It's strange how much everything seems to cost, even if you are only breast-feeding.

I decide to write everyone who owes me money. I will say, ‘Even if you can't pay it all back, half will do.'

I go down the list, and then I think of Mik. Should I? Why not.

I write him in care of his mother. I ask him if he could pay back what I spent on the clothes that time. I mail all the letters off, and I get a rather good return. Almost everyone pays me.

I can't remember what I spent on Mik's clothes. I say approximately ninety, but if he remembers otherwise, that's okay.

 

LAST WEEKEND, Francie says, ‘Over 200.' ‘Really?'

 

AUNT CARRINGTON and Aunt Foster phone. They hear the baby cry. They're on the extension phones. Aunt Carrington says, ‘I'm coming out.' Later, she tells me, ‘I went right over to your mother's. I said, “You get on the phone, Ellen, and you forgive her. You do it now.”'

I say, ‘Was that when she called and forgave me?'

‘Yes. I stood over her,' Aunt Carrington says.

‘I wish you hadn't told me. I thought she meant it.'

But before Aunt Carrington arrives, driving in her great blue car through the mountains, Mik comes bashing at the door. Thump smash crash. Boom bang.

I pick up the baby and go into the bathroom. Lock the connecting door. Pound on Mrs Leigh's door. She's listening to the eleven o'clock news. ‘What is it?' she says but I give her the baby and push her inside her room. Lock her door behind me. And out her door and up the stairs to the neighbour who didn't want to get involved. Call the police. Back down and into Mrs Leigh's room. It sounds like Armageddon through the bathroom. Bish bang crash thud.