Garden of Eden (28 page)

“I heard about her, though. I phoned Oxfam and CARE and a half a dozen relief agencies in Ottawa, you know, looking for the ones that sent people to Ethiopia during the famine. Finally I found somebody who remembered her name. She sent a message to somebody in the field and about six months later I got an answer. She was in Addis Ababa then. That was six, seven years ago or so. But where she went after that, I don’t know.” He pauses. “Or why.” He laughs, humourlessly, lifting his eyes to Iris’s, and momentarily forgetting her own guilt, she finds herself joining him. That was Lannie for you. Try as you might, you couldn’t reach her. Did Barney reach her better than I did? she wonders, thinking again of the money. No, he was angry when he did it, not with Lannie, but with me. Did he blame
me for the way she couldn’t seem to right herself, or did he blame himself?

Tim yawns, and hands clasped, stretches his arms upward in a way that’s almost contented, gazing out the window to the clutter of shabby rooftops and beyond them, to the blank-faced glass towers of the city. She thinks of Allan, sees with something close to envy that Tim has succeeded in putting Lannie behind him.

As she’s standing in the door to say a final goodbye, Tim says, in a rush, “Why did she try to kill herself?” It feels to Iris as if the air between them has suddenly heated up so that it’s hard to breathe. She’s seeing the wild car ride, the way Lannie’s long, reddish-gold hair bounced like a rag doll’s as the car bumped over ruts with Barney clenching the wheel, trying to get to the hospital in Chinook before it was too late. Her face white as the sheets of her hospital bed and that look in her eyes, as if there was nobody there, nobody home at all, just a big hollow inside her. And Barney wouldn’t come to the hospital, not for a couple of days, Lannie asking after him and Iris not knowing what to say. He did blame himself, she thinks, or else he felt responsible for his brother’s failures as a father. Maybe it was his own life — he and Luke and Howard fighting all the time, never resolving anything, and Lannie the offspring of all that rage — so that he couldn’t sort things out clearly either.

“You lived with her and she never told you?” she says. It’s on the tip of her tongue to tell him Lannie was pregnant, but she stops herself. Lannie had never told her who the father was; Iris hadn’t asked, assuming it was Tim since he was her boyfriend. No, if Lannie wouldn’t, she can’t tell him. At last she says, “It wasn’t something that made sense, not then, not now.” He studies her face and she holds it open to him, to let him see she’s not hiding anything even though she is, and when he’s finished his searching he seems relieved, although still baffled.

“Will you tell me where she is if you find her?” he asks. “I’d just like to know she’s okay.” He stares down at his slippers, his hands in his jeans pockets. “Sometimes I miss her,” he says, and flushes, then shrugs.

It occurs to her that a picture of Lannie might help her in her
search. “Do you have a picture of her I could borrow?” He’s thoughtful for a second, then says, “Yeah, I do. Wait.” He goes rapidly across the room, through the door into the living room, leaving it ajar. She hears a soft exchange of voices, the bang of a drawer, then Tim is back. “Here.” It’s a colour shot of Lannie sitting on the red sofa in the other room, the lamp on the table beside it lit so that one side of her face is clear and the other in shadow. She’s smiling in that distant, bemused way she had, her eyes not on the camera, but off to one side, gazing at something not in the picture. Iris thanks Tim and tucks it away carefully in her purse.

“That person who told you she was in Ethiopia — what was her name? Maybe I could get more up-to-date information from her.”

He hesitates, looks down at his feet in their worn embroidered silk slippers, incongruous on such big feet, and says, “I can’t remember her name.” He’s silent for a second longer, thinking. “But she phoned some guy who’d just come back. He was actually the one who knew where she was. I talked to him on the phone. What was his name?” He stares into space over her head. “Sargent, that was it. Rob Sargent. In Ottawa.”

“Ottawa,” Iris repeats.

“He was an engineer, but he came back and started his own consulting business. Seemed like a nice guy. Said he’d run across her in the camps.”

Iris quickly reopens her purse, takes out her address book, prints the name, and puts it back.

“You’ve been a big help, Tim. I’m sorry if I —” she hesitates, “opened old wounds. I mean —”

“No, no,” he asssures her. “I’ve never stopped wondering about her. I’m glad you’re looking for her.”

She goes back down the hall and the steep stairs with the little piles of dirt and dead bugs in the corners, past the faded, illegible graffiti and the cobweb quivering gently in the still, dusty air, back out onto the street which hits her, with its noise and motion, like a physical blow. A taxi, its driver seeing her standing there at curbside in her smart suit, swerves out of the traffic and pulls up beside her. She gets in and names her hotel.

So many ideas are racing through her mind, Iris doesn’t quite catch one before another has taken its place, and adding to the mental tumult is the muddle the cab is rushing her through: the streets thick with people of all races — at home there are only white faces — the incessant din and rush of the traffic, the signs everywhere demanding attention, the store windows, the contents of which she catches only glimpses, books, clothing, people sitting at tables in restaurants and coffee shops, dishes, furniture, computers, jewellery, shoes, paintings, posters, magazines. It’s overwhelming. Then the taxi is swerving to the curb, slowing to a stop, and a man in a smart, navy pin-striped suit carrying a shiny leather briefcase is opening the door for her, not even looking at her, he wants her cab. She pays, clambers out, and pushes her way through the revolving glass doors of her hotel, hardly seeing where she’s going.

She closes the door of her room behind her and leans her back against it as if she has been on the run from something and has found refuge. But the room, decorated in beiges and creams probably to soothe the weary traveller, oppresses her. She walks to the window, pulls back the curtain and looks out, but her window faces a wall of other windows, so she turns away again and begins to pace, trying to think what to do next.

Should she go to the airport and buy a ticket for Ethiopia? She thinks of Africa, what little she knows: wet green jungles, zebra and lions, drums, stately black men in colourful robes, poverty and mystery and — She’s frightened, it’s too far away, it’s dangerous, the people there don’t speak English. She should simply go to the airport, catch the first plane back home and start writing letters. But now she remembers herself the day she left home writing her name in the dust on the piano, as if to convince herself that in a Barneyless world she did still exist.

She imagines arriving home, starting over again with Barney gone and Lannie lost, somewhere: it’s like having an itch you can’t scratch; worse, it’s like knowing there’s something you have to do, but can’t think what it is. And until you do, you can’t go forward, and circumstances won’t let you go back. It would be impossible to live like that for the rest of her life. No, it’s clear she can’t go home.

She kicks off her shoes and lies down on the bed, but her mind won’t stop going round and round. Lannie might not be in Africa any more. If she isn’t, how will she ever find out where she is? She supposes she’ll have to go to Ottawa … Finally her eyelids drift shut, and she allows herself to sleep.

Everything is too large, too close to get a clear look at, too richly coloured. It’s a country more real than the everyday one she inhabits. Howard moves around the log cabin beneath the blue mountains, Misty goes past, retreating toward a red barn, Jay bends over her, the torrent of black water in front of Barney’s cabin swirls up around her and it’s cold, it’s tugging hard on her, trying to pull her under.

She opens her eyes slowly into the early evening shadows. Her dream has left her feeling weak, as if she has been ill. She waits for her strength to return, for colour to seep back into the room; it’s too pale a world, this so-called real one.

She clicks on the bedside lamp and the room grows distinct, the dark wooden furniture taking on a richness of colour in the lamp’s warm yellow glow, the cream walls turning apricot in its light. As she comes fully awake she sits up, her neck aching from lying awkwardly against the pillow, and tries to think what to do next. Beyond not going to Ethiopia she has no ideas. Oh, yes, Ottawa, but her head feels heavy and thick and she could cry with the disappointment of not finding Lannie here, in a Canadian city, where lost nieces ought to be. And yet, she tells herself, she had not really thought Lannie would be easy to find. Her own loneliness feels enlarged, room-size, and she wishes she were home, planting her garden, that Barney was inside, sitting at the kitchen table doing his books, or roaring his way across the field in his big tractor.

Or in bed with her. Her memory, always out to catch her off-guard, flashes back to the first year of their marriage, to the love they felt for each other that was so bound up with lovemaking that some mornings when she woke, Barney asleep against her, their legs entwined, she could hardly tell where her body ended and his began.

Their sex life had been good for all those years. But she won’t think now about what had gone wrong.

She decides to see what Ramona has to say about what she should do, but the phone rings and rings into silence and finally Iris sets the receiver back on its cradle. The only person she knows in this whole city, other than Tim, is Jay Anselm. She locates the phone book, searches rapidly through it, and to her surprise and relief finds his number. Then she paces a bit, trying to decide whether she should phone him or not. He kissed me, she tells herself. I showed him my home, he should be willing to do the same for me. Even though she knows these are only excuses she’s making up for doing something really because she wants to; carried on their reasonableness, she dials quickly, before she changes her mind.

“Iris!” he says, surprised. “What are you doing here?” Her body flushes with warmth at the sound of his voice, at his apparent delight at hearing hers.

“I have this niece,” she says, “and she — I lost track of her years ago — her last address is here, in Toronto. I just made up my mind it was time to find her. Because, well — with Barney gone —” She falters.

“I understand,” he interrupts. “And if I don’t, you can fill me in. That is — are you alone? Where are you staying?” She tells him she’s alone, knows no one in the city but him, gives him the name of her hotel.

“Nice place,” he says. “I heard you’re rich — a rich widow.” She laughs nervously, embarrassed, a bit irritated. “I’ll come and get you. Have you had dinner?”

“No,” she says, feeling shy, wondering if she’s supposed to say she has, but she knows that even if she had eaten she’d pretend she hadn’t just to see him again. But all he says is, “I can be there in twenty minutes.”

When she hangs up the phone, she sits for a minute, happy, then unsettled by this surge of elation, doubtful. He’s almost half your age, she reminds herself, and Barney has hardly been gone two months. But then pleasure at seeing Jay again wells up, casting her uneasiness into shadow.

She hurries into the bathroom, washes her face, puts on fresh
makeup, changes from her suit to a slightly wrinkled blue linen skirt and matching blouse, low-heeled summer shoes, and her light blue blazer. Studying herself in the mirror, she thinks she looks attractive, but casual enough that he won’t think she’s trying to impress him. Feeling like a teenager about to go out on a date, she is for a brief instant hurtled back through the years to pacing in her room waiting for her date’s arrival, after an hour — no, she has to confess, it usually took her two hours — to complete her ritual bathing, plucking, brushing, perfuming, dressing, undressing, dressing again, preening in front of her mirror. And the moments when, snuggled against her date at the movies or in his car, his arm heavy around her shoulders, feeling low in her abdomen such lightness, such breathless possibility, not knowing what it was, but feeling its rightness, its — She pauses, thinking, And I still need a man, if not in the same way I did when I was a girl. The realization sobers her.

He’s pushing open the big glass doors as she steps off the elevator; they spot each other at once. She halts, overcome with nervousness, and he strides toward her. He’s wearing a black T-shirt today, under the same worn black sportscoat, and jeans and his cowboy boots, which she notices he has cleaned. What looked odd in Chinook is exactly right in this setting. He looks at ease, sophisticated, rakish. When he reaches her, he gives her a swift, brotherly hug that contains no hint of desire and she’s left midway between disappointment and relief. He looks so young tonight, his eyes are such a clear, guileless brown; surely everyone will take him for her son.

“We can eat at this great little place I know — if you like Indian food.” Without waiting for her answer he takes her arm and leads her away from the bank of polished-brass elevators, past the low blond wood table with its oversized vase of pink and white silk flowers and the overstuffed green sofas, and out onto the street. “How are you?” he asks. “Have you checked that address you had for her already? Or will you do it tomorrow? It’s this way.”

They cross the wide, busy street, Jay hurrying her, and turn down a narrower, quieter side street, walk a short distance past shuttered,
dark brick buildings and enter a shabby café, brightly lit and full of chattering people seated at small tables crowded close together. The smell of curry and spices she can’t identify weight the air. A young woman wearing a dark red sari leads them to a table. Iris doesn’t try to answer Jay’s question until they’re seated and she has gone away. “I’ve been to that address. Her old boyfriend still lives there. He said she’s gone from there a long time. He isn’t sure where she is, but he gave me a lead.” But then the woman returns with menus and glasses of water, Jay orders beer for himself, wine for her, accepts the menus, turns back to her. She tells him what Tim told her.