I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place (7 page)

I said, “You make decisions, like or dislike, faster than me.”

We looked at all the paintings and some scrolls, drank hot chocolate and wine, and ate cheese and crackers, everything that was on offer. It was our dinner. We were in the gallery for about half an hour, I'd say. Then we repaired to a student café on Duke Street near the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. We took a window-side table. When our espressos arrived, Mathilde said, “I'll elope with you if we can come to some agreement about that painting we just saw. And don't act like you're merely resigned to talking about this. I want you to be interested.”

Just then, for all her insistence, as she sat across the wooden table from me, her coat and scarf still on, I got lost in her physical self—
entranced
might be the word—as if I were memorizing her. This no doubt doesn't speak well for me: shouldn't one live fully in the moment. Still, there it was. Barely shoulder-length black hair with two red streaks swirled up in a topknot and tucked under her knitted hat, skin flushed from the cold, brown eyes wistful even when she was joyful, prominent cheekbones, and her nose—which, as she had put it, “I only liked after it was broken when I was playing high school lacrosse,” and which had been broken a second time when she'd taken a spill from a moped. She had a slightly tilted smile that thrilled me.

Almost without reprieve, we had been out of sync with each other, contentious, all without discussion, for about a week. The most vexing aspect of this was to experience the symptoms of Mathilde's discontent without knowing if there was an exact cause. She'd been painting for upward of eighteen hours a day. I hadn't discovered a passion even remotely comparable. I liked to read and look at birds and compose long handwritten letters. But I sensed that
liking
wasn't enough to fill a life.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Sorry, I drifted off.”

“We should talk about the painting. I think we saw it differently.”

We sat there until the café closed, which must've been midnight at least.
Grey Geese
Descending
was ostensibly the subject at hand. But for the next few hours deeper information about each other was also being requisitioned. Hard to describe this, but I believe we both knew something was ending. Then, either you have to start a second romance within the first or all is lost. More likely, Mathilde knew it, and I didn't want to know it. After her death, I understood that by presenting the offer—“I'll elope with you if we can come to some agreement on the painting we just saw”—she might have intended it as a kind of fait accompli, since she knew in advance that we would not agree. To put it another way, if in the end this conversation wasn't intended to be a kind of elegy, each sentence we spoke seemed tense with elegiac anticipation. Half an hour into it I wanted the conversation to stop, and Mathilde seemed about to ask the café's proprietor to let us stay the entire night in order to continue it.

I thought
Grey Geese Descending,
in every specific and general aspect, was an allegory of sadness; conversely, Mathilde saw it as having captured “the mood of the painter and therefore the mood of the landscape itself.” She said, “You don't really know enough about psychology to psychologize so much about this painting. That kind of talk keeps you from feeling the beauty of it.”

I said, “You're the one who tried to tell me what that goose was thinking—that it was hesitating to land.”

“Stop reading yourself into the painting.”

On and on like that. It would have been wonderful if we were simply using different sensibilities to come to a mutual understanding, a duet of opposite natures, but this was more an exchange, in self-consciously subdued voices, of a maddening civility that might more characterize the first conversation between two people trying to get to know each other. Then, minutes before the café closed, Mathilde asked with huffy directness, “Did you realize that my saying we should elope was a marriage proposal?” I said, “But since you didn't invite me to Saskatchewan—” Mathilde said, “We can elope right here in Halifax.”

Using a directory and the café's telephone, we woke up a justice of the peace at one
A.M.
and walked to his house. After a few perfunctory questions, he said, “This can't legally work. You, sir, are an American citizen, and you, madam, are a citizen of Morocco. Also, you need a witness.” Mathilde said, “We can be our own witnesses.” “Not on paper,” the justice of the peace said. We shrugged, apologized for waking him but not for the reason we had woken him, and left, acquiescing for the moment to international legalities.

Within an hour, in bed in Mathilde's apartment, our uninhibited lovemaking was new and surprising. Something had let go. “I don't care what anybody says. This feels like a marriage bed,” she said, then got up to smoke a cigarette and make coffee.

“Well, you'd know and I wouldn't.”

I immediately regretted saying that, but she seemed to ignore it. Yet the very sweat on our bodies and bedclothes seemed to be the prescient fragrance of final melancholy. Our lips were sore and swollen, and we took separate hot baths.

The next morning, Mathilde left before I woke, two days earlier than she'd originally planned. From Regina, Saskatchewan, she sent a picture postcard of a man and woman eloping: the man had set a ladder against a house and was standing on the top rung, just outside the woman's open bedroom window, through which she was handing him her suitcase. Through the living room window you could see the woman's mother and father watching television. President Eisenhower was on the screen. There was a full moon in the sky. The scolding caption read:
The moon makes these two act impetuously! Big mistake!
Matilda's own handwritten message was:
I do.

 

I don't know much about premonition. Nor would I necessarily recognize, let alone trust, its opportunities. Yet thinking back on those particular days, it may have been some sort of premonitory agitation that kept me awake for the eight nights of Hanukkah, which framed on the calendar Mathilde's absence. I slept in fits and starts during the day, but I didn't sleep one minute at night. It was an insomnia tailored to this circumstance and was unnerving.

 

Isador Sarovnik wasn't technically my uncle. I informally adopted him and referred to him as an uncle because, beyond his being avuncular, I felt far closer to him than I did to any of my actual relatives. Bereft of parents, bereft of locatable uncles and aunts, I began to concentrate every ounce of filial love and affection onto others, Isador being the most indispensable and dear to me.

In Isador I saw the complete résumé of an interesting, beloved uncle. In December of 1969, Isador was eighty-one years old. He had retired at age sixty-five from being a bellman (“I was the first Jewish senior bellman in Nova Scotia, possibly in all of Canada”) at several hotels in Halifax, ending with the Lord Nelson. Before Hitler's psychotic Reich, Isador had been a stage actor in Berlin and Budapest; as he mentioned at every opportunity, as a young man he was friends with Peter Lorre. “Lazzy got me a little acting work after the war,” Isador told me. Given that all but a few of his relatives, and many of his friends, had been slaughtered in concentration camps, the fact that Isador had played, in
The Cross of Lorraine,
the part of a Nazi soldier was something he could never forgive himself for, “even though I was raising a family and needed work.” His wife, Sarah, had died in 1962, and his two daughters lived in Vancouver; he saw them infrequently, which was a source of great sadness to him.

Isador harbored special affection for Peter Lorre, and once, quite seriously, said to me, “In the 1950s I wrote a letter to Los Angeles and invited Lazzy to Halifax, but he had no interest in this part of the world. I would have made it nice for him. Rolled out the red carpet in the hotel here. Too bad.” One night in his hotel room I watched
Casablanca
with Isador. When Lorre first appeared on screen, Isador said, “Lazzy looks very good in that suit.”

When Hanukkah arrived, Isador asked me to eat dinner with him on all eight nights in his room, number 411. By then I knew the hotel. I'd had short-lived employment as a bellman at a time when Isador, a respected emeritus figure, was filling in as concierge for a man who had the flu. I remember Isador saying, “I call it influenza—not flu. You don't use nicknames. You don't buddy up to something that can kill you.” As a bellman I'd lasted about ten days, finally getting sacked because I called a woman whose luggage I was carrying a “wrinkled fucking old whore” in response to her confiding to me in the electric lift, “I wouldn't have registered in this hotel had I known an old Jew was the concierge.” As it happened, the manager of the hotel had been in the electric lift, too.

I delivered the suitcases to the woman's room. Every bellman had been instructed to tell each patron his name and say, “If there is anything you need, please ask for me at the front desk.” But after setting her suitcases down, I said, “If you want to jump out the window, call the front desk and ask for me. I'll come right up and open it for you.” I didn't wait for a tip. The hotel manager had politely kept the gate of the electric lift open and was waiting for me. I was unemployed by the time we reached the lobby.

Despite being fired, I often hung around the hotel lobby. I liked sitting on one of the big sofas to read. I had lunch with Isador at least three times a week. But the pertinent thing here is that Isador adored Mathilde. I knew so few people in Halifax, and he was the one person who spent any time with us as a couple, mainly over dinners at the hotel. On the other hand, I met any number of Mathilde's artist friends, usually over coffee in cafés or at art galleries. Whenever anyone asked me what I did in life, I'd say, “I'm working on it”—feeble, unimpressive, but true. Once, a little tipsy at a painting exhibit, I said, “Well, I'm going to write a novel, but I'm not starting it for fifteen years.” (This must have sounded acerbic if not delusional, but as it turned out, it was prophetic: my first novel was published when I was thirty-eight, and it took three years to write.) I knew the question, from Mathilde's friends, was really, “Why are you with him?” It was a good question, a question from curious and protective friends. It was a question I'd often asked myself.

So, during Hanukkah, Isador would say the blessings, light the candles, and set out dinner, sent up from the hotel kitchen. I had some deep discussions with him about life and love. By
life
I mean Mathilde. With Isador it was never a case of his dishing out platitudes, no
Tuesdays with Morrie
bullshit, all sweetness and light. “You know who I saw the other day?” he asked. “That son of a bitch Mr. Kelb. You remember, I told you he used to live in the hotel here, what, maybe twenty years. Then his son and daughter-in-law gave him his own room above their garage. Do you know that when that son of a bitch lived in the hotel, he used to walk in, hand me his bag of groceries—me, the senior bellman—get on the electric lift, and slide the gate shut behind him so I'd have to wait for him to send it down again. He'd say the same goddamn thing every time: ‘I prefer to go upstairs unencumbered.' Let them put that on his gravestone for all I care. Except I hope when he kicks the bucket he's going downstairs, not upstairs, if you know what I mean.”

Apart from the elopement postcard, I wasn't hearing from Mathilde at all. On the fifth night of Hanukkah, I mentioned this to Isador. He'd just set the room service tray out in the hallway. “What's there for her to tell you?” Isador said. “She's freezing her
tuches
off out there in Saskatchewan. She's painting her paintings. She's sleeping, she's waking up. But that's not the problem, is it? No, the problem is, you're in over your head with this Mathilde. You're drowning. She's walking so far ahead of you—is this how it feels?—she's about to turn the corner and disappear. You need to figure out what skills you have. I can get you work in the hotel if you want. I'm sure the thing that happened with the anti-Semite is water under the bridge by now. Besides, the hotel's got a new owner. It's been advertising for bellmen.”

“I showed Mathilde some of my writing.”

“What did she say about it?”

“She suggested hotel work—for the time being.”

“See, brilliant minds think alike. There's worse things than hotel work, let me remind you.”

Each night a candle was added to the menorah on Isador's kitchen table; each night another conversation about the ongoing soap opera, as Isador called my life. By the eighth night, he'd narrowed his tolerance for my unwillingness to see the truth. “Once and for all, here's my understanding of everything with this,” he said. “Your Mathilde's got bigger appetites for life than you have. God in heaven, you can't even read half the same menu she's reading. So what's your choice? Savor the time you have with this Mathilde, for as long as one of
her
appetites is for you. Count your blessings. Let me put this in an old immigrant's way: she's got a lot of stickers on her steamer trunk.” (I've never since been able to see, in a photograph or movie, world travelers about to embark on, say, a 1930s luxury liner, standing on the dock next to their big steamer trunks festooned with travel stickers, without thinking of Isador saying this to me.) “Now, can we
please
try and enjoy the last night of this ancient holiday without you sounding like such a pitiful shmuck?
Meshugga,
so worked up! It's like you've forgotten how to take a piss. Forgotten how to lift a fork to your mouth. You aren't thinking of doing anything harmful to yourself, are you?”

 

Roughly a month after I'd first met Mathilde, I got Isador to go with me to my favorite birding haunt near Port Medway, about a two-hour drive from Halifax. This was, believe me, a triumph of Herculean dimensions, getting Isador Sarovnik out to a beach. Through stubborn persistence I'd managed to persuade the editor of the travel section of the Sunday
Halifax Herald
to commission an article on a protected bird preserve. I felt this to be the start of something substantial, possibly even a career. Once I'd informed Isador and asked him to accompany me, he said, “Sure, why not? I'd just as soon drop dead out by the Atlantic Ocean as anywhere, what's the difference? Besides, I need the actual evidence of you earning some money, being a solid citizen. You can take your millions and buy your Mathilde some paintbrushes. How much are they paying you, this newspaper, to write about birds?”