Famished Lover (21 page)

“Get up!” Margaret steams, and I look at her, startled. The air is hotter than a boiled bath, and I can feel the sweat rotting my joints. I try to see up, up where I know the little space should be — the window to stars or snow or night or day. But the window isn't there.

“You're sleeping your life away!” Margaret says. She is all in black, in mourning. For Witherspoon?

“He'll still be dead no matter what I do,” I say. I feel as if I'm breathing through sopping canvas. Even Margaret is sweating. She takes a lace handkerchief from her sleeve and mops her brow and cheeks.

An alarm clangs and Collins rushes past us in a German uniform except for his boots — he still has on his fannigan wooden clogs. They make a horrible clacking on the floor. Margaret pulls at my arm.

“If it wasn't for you, he would have been all right!” she says. “Now get out of bed!”

I am waiting for Agony to follow after Collins, for the dogs and the guards. Suddenly I can hear them, a mob smashing at the barracks door.

“Jesus!”

I sat up and looked around. Awake now, blinking, breathing like a sprinter.

I saw Lillian's slumped form beside me. She'd kicked all the covers onto the far corner of our sagging bed. It was stifling hot, even with the one miserable bedroom window thrown wide open. The air smelled of rot and sweating bodies. On the ceiling ghostly little clusters of loose paint flakes were waiting to snow on us in the middle of summer. Time and time again we'd scraped them off, only to find them replaced within a few days by more moulting flakes. The landlord would not paint, and I couldn't spare the money — not for decoration, when there was barely enough for food and the rent for this horrible flat.

Lillian turned over uneasily. She was in her lightest summer
nightdress. I thought of nudging her awake, of trying to stir up the night air.

But I didn't move. I closed my eyes to picture Margaret again. Margaret without Collins, without Witherspoon and Agony and the rest. Just Margaret on her own, in the skin, if I could manage it. But all I saw was Dorothy's face, her large eyes, the slim taper of her fingers.

What was that joke she had come up with this morning? She was bursting to tell it: how the police raided a brothel last night not far from where she lives and found a Catholic priest, the fire chief and the attorney general. “The police ask the men, ‘What have you got to say for yourselves?' She put on her deepest voice.

“And the priest says to the police, ‘Several of these women have sinned and I have been taking their confessions.'

“And the fire chief says to the police, ‘The room in the back is poorly ventilated and poses a significant risk.'

“And the attorney general says to the police, ‘I thought you guys weren't booked in here till Wednesday!'”

Her laughter sounded across the building. I thought about how she blew smoke out the side of her mouth and looked away so often when she was talking, only to turn back with those grappling eyes. I thought about how a woman will build up in your mind and body, settle in like an illness you want to have.

The baby started to cry. I got up quickly, relieved for the distraction. The air was even worse by the baby's bed. He was glistening with sweat in the silvery light, tossing and moaning in his sleep.

“Michael.” As I carried him onto the fire escape for fresher
air he nuzzled his tiny face against my chest and moved his lips in a semi-conscious search for his mother's breast. It must have been two or three in the morning. The street below was deathly still. A yellow dog ran across it, sniffing at something I couldn't see, and the breeze blew a few paper bits this way and that without conviction. The whole city had settled into silence. But the air was fresh and almost cool compared to what was trapped inside our tenement rooms.

Michael stayed cuddled in my arms, and in our own ways we studied the middle of the night. I found myself singing a silly old marching song.

Wash me in the water

That you washed your dirty daughter

And I shall be whiter

Than the whitewash on the wall
.

Lillian came out then. She'd wrapped her robe tightly around her and looked at me suspiciously.

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to breathe,” I said.

“Were you singing? It's the middle of the night.”

She turned around then and disappeared into the gloom.

I stayed where I was and looked again at the street. A few dusty-leaved trees waved ghostly fingers in the desultory gusts of wind, and the yellow dog was making his way back towards us with something dark in his mouth, pulled from the garbage no doubt.

“Some nights like this,” I whispered to my boy, “I looked out at eternity. Some nights in battle everything would fall still, and the birds would sing — nightingales — their beautiful,
gentle, high-pitched little love songs. And starlings would swoop underneath the moon, and it seemed that if anything could last forever, this would. This peace.”

The baby buried his warm face in my shoulder.

“Are you coming?” Lillian called. She sounded fed up. How could I blame her? This was no way to live, packed in a squalid little box, afraid of every little expense, of every sniffle. I stood and adjusted Michael on my shoulder, then stepped back into the stuffy air. When I eased the child into his crib he yawned and balled his fists and rolled over, his face pushed into the pillow.

In the bedroom I settled myself as lightly as possible beside Lillian's still, tight body. For some minutes I listened to her breathing, which was slow and deep but mostly an act. When I brushed my hand against her backside she tensed.

I know how you feel
, I thought, but I could not say the words.

I withdrew my hand and lay as still as possible, trying not to look at the murky paint flakes on the ceiling.

“Ramsay, do you think you could carry a box of files to my apartment for me? It's only a couple of blocks away, on Stanley,” Dorothy said to me.

We were well into August now and I'd finished for the day, a very nice portrait, I thought, of a young woman in the act of taking off a swimsuit in front of a mirror and surveying the red damage of sunburn on her lovely shoulders and arms. The box in question was covering most of Dorothy's desk. She was getting ready to close the office when David
came stumbling through the door of his studio. He wiped a rag over his sweating face.

He always seemed to sweat when he painted.

“I can certainly take a box for you, my dear!” David said. “I'm just heading your way, I believe.”

Paint smears decorated his red, puffy cheek. He turned to me. “Have you seen the young one, Ramsay? What's her name?”

“You mean Rebecca Childes,” Dorothy said.

“Rebecca Childes! Rebecca Childes!” David sang. “Her body is the closest approximation to heaven I have ever seen. And you can quote me, my dear!”

“You say that nearly every day, David,” Dorothy replied.

Then the size of the box registered with him, and suddenly his back was feeling unreliable, and he announced that he was not finished with Rebecca Childes after all. To me in a stage whisper he said, “She should pay you for this box-hauling time. She'll have you scrubbing her kitchen floor next, and fixing her windows.”

“David, you go fix your own windows!” she said.

I lifted the box. It was heavy enough that I wondered if my elbow could manage it.

“Can I trust you to lock up, David?” Dorothy asked.

“Of course. Just let me steal the profits first!” He disappeared again behind the door. I caught a glimpse of his Miss Childes, a statuesque redhead sitting in a black slip, sipping from a coffee cup that she rested on her lap.

I carried the box along the hall and down the stairs, then out onto the busy sidewalk. The city had been baking for weeks. I was in shirt sleeves, and I had loosened my tie and wore my hat pushed high on my head. It was not as muggy
as many late afternoons in a Montreal summer, but the sidewalks radiated heat and the traffic on the street moved sluggishly, like camels in the desert.

Dorothy was a fast walker, her tiny legs scissoring in high-heeled shoes. Under my load I had to push to keep up with her, and I began to regret the assignment. Within a few minutes sweat was stinging my eyes. Up the hill we marched, then we turned into her building and climbed five hard flights. When we finally reached her door my chest was heaving and my arms screamed for release.

“I am so grateful to you. You're wonderfully strong,” she said, and before she slid her key in the door she touched my shoulder with her hand.

I carried the box into the apartment and willed myself to let it down slowly onto the table, rather than drop it. When it was down I rubbed my arms and flexed my fingers to revive the circulation.

“I hope that wasn't too awful?” she said, in her slightly mocking way. “Can I pour you a drink?”

“Some water would be fine, thank you.”

“How about a real drink?”

I stayed with the water and watched her pour out two fingers of scotch for herself, which she downed with a quick, convulsive tip of the glass. Her face was newly flushed and her eyes shone.

“I wonder, while you're here, if you could look at a shelf for me in the other room?” She pointed to what I could plainly see was her bedroom. She looked as if she was trying to fight off waves of embarrassment.

“What's wrong with it?”

“Something's loose,” she said nervously. She didn't move
towards the bedroom but remained with the glass in her hand, staring at me.

It's an extraordinary thing when a woman shows her desire. I felt as though, without moving, she'd taken several steps towards me. My breathing was still ragged from the lifting.

“Is it . . . fastened properly?”

“I'm not sure that it is.” Her eyes did not flicker away.

I'm a married man, I imagined myself reminding her, though the words didn't emerge. I moved towards her and she stayed exactly where she was: wary, open, holding her breath.

I didn't know what I was going to do. She tilted her head as I got closer. I ducked mine and stepped past her into the bedroom, then scanned the walls idiotically, looking for a loose shelf. She did not follow me right away, but paused to pour herself another drink. I wished I'd taken one as well.

The bed was in a far corner, single, with a plain white cover. The drapes were beige, masculine. But a pretty writing desk under the window looked delicate and finely wrought. The only bookshelf ran along the wall to the left of the desk. I strode over to it, happy to have some sort of purpose, and tried rattling it, but the wall fasteners were solid.

When I turned around she was sitting behind me on the bed, her legs swinging gently. She leaned back on her right arm and sipped more of her drink. Her hair was loose on her shoulders.

“I'm afraid I can't,” I said without looking at her.

For several seconds those were the only words that hung between us.

“It's all right,” she said finally. She pulled at my hand until

I looked at her. “I don't make a habit of this, if that's what you think.”

“No, I —”

“Shut up a second. I know you're married. But you've kind of snuck up on me, Ramsay Crome. These are such sad times. Now you know where I live.”

She let go of my hand and downed her drink.

“The lady has just told you how she feels. You should thank her and leave it at that, and I will see you at work tomorrow.”

I could hardly move towards the door.

But — “Thank you,” I managed.

I walked home almost drunkenly, the heat of the early evening oiling my limbs. It seemed the earth itself had tilted. But cars chugged down the streets in their same old oblivious way, and men and women continued to walk the lanes, and the stores that still remained open advertised their wares at rock-bottom prices.

I was dizzy with the nearness of so many sharp edges.

I mounted the rickety iron stairs to our old flat, newly disgusted with the poverty and grime of the neighbourhood, with the stench of rotting garbage from the bins behind the building, with the shabby windows and the grubby door that stuck in the heat, and with the dark gloom within those walls which was the best that a middle-aged fannigan could afford.

“Long day?” Lillian said when she saw me. She was clutching
Michael to her chest, and the tiny kitchen smelled of boiling potatoes. I kissed them both quickly.

“I need to wash up. I'm afraid I'm filthy. I walked in the heat.”

“Was something wrong with the trolley car?”

“Everything was so slow,” I said vaguely, then splashed water on my face from the basin. I imagined guilt reeking from my pores. But all I could see in her face was what had been there for a long time already: the slow, grey fatigue of living poor in the city, the shadows lining her eyes as if it were forever December.