Life Before Man (12 page)

Her parents thought she was becoming too wrapped up in these things and tried to give her dancing lessons to make her more sociable. Too late, she was not sociable. They blamed, silently of course, her Grandmother Etlin, who’d first taken her to the Museum, not because she had any interest in the things inside it but because
it was cheap and out of the rain. Because her Grandmother Smylski had Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, Grandmother Etlin insisted on having three days as well, all in a row, even though it meant violating the Sabbath; which didn’t bother Grandmother Etlin all that much. She kept kosher out of habit but was not in other ways visibly reverent. After Lesje started school they’d kept this Saturday custom. Instead of synagogue Lesje attended the Museum, which at first did look to her a little like a church or a shrine, as if you were supposed to kneel. It was quiet and smelled mysterious, and was full of sacred objects: quartz, amethyst, basalt.

(When her grandmother died, Lesje felt she should be put into the Museum, in a glass case like the Egyptian mummies, with a label where you could read about her. An impossible idea; but this was the form her mourning took. She knew better than to say it though, at shiva, sitting in a corner of her aunt’s huge pink and white living room while they all ate coffee cake. They’d finally let her into the synagogue, too, but it hadn’t been mysterious at all. Neither the bright, clean-lined synagogue nor the pink living room seemed at all like her grandmother. A glass case in a shadowy corner, with her black boots standing at the bottom and her few pieces of gold jewelry and the amber beads spread out beside her.)

“Explain me,” her grandmother would say, holding her hand tightly, for protection Lesje decided much later; and Lesje would read the labels to her. Her grandmother understood not at all, but nodded wisely, smiling; not because of the impressive rocks, as Lesje thought at the time, but because her granddaughter seemed able to negotiate with ease in this world she herself found so incomprehensible.

In the last year of her grandmother’s life, when Lesje was twelve and they were both getting a little old for these mornings, they’d
seen something at the Museum which upset her grandmother. She’d long ago got used to the mummies in the Egyptian gallery and she no longer said
Gevalt
every time they went into the dinosaur gallery, which was not at that time dark and equipped with voices. But this was something different. They’d seen an Indian woman, wearing a beautiful red sari with a gold band at the hem. Over the top of the sari was a white lab coat, and with the woman were two little girls, obviously her daughters, wearing Scottish kilts. They all disappeared through a door marked
STAFF ONLY
. “Gevalt,” her grandmother said, frowning, but not with fear.

Lesje stared after them, entranced. This, then, was her own nationality.

“You’d look good in that,” Marianne says. She sometimes gives Lesje advice on how she ought to dress, which Lesje ignores since she doesn’t feel capable of following it. Marianne, who has to watch what she eats, thinks Lesje should be stately. She could be stately, Marianne says, if she wouldn’t lope. They’re looking at a long-skirted plum wool dress, subdued, exorbitantly expensive.

“I’d never wear it,” Lesje says; meaning, William never takes me anywhere I could wear it.

“Now here,” says Marianne, moving to the next window, “you have your basic Elizabeth Schoenhof little black dress.”

“Too goyish?” Lesje says, thinking Marianne is being derisive, and oddly delighted.

“Oh, no,” Marianne says. “Look at the
cut
. Elizabeth Schoenhof isn’t goyish, she’s haute Wasp.”

Lesje, deflated, asks what the difference is.

“Haute Wasp,” says Marianne, “is when you don’t have to give a piss. Haute Wasp is when you have this tatty carpet that looks like hell but cost a million bucks, and only a few people know it.
Remember when the Queen picked up a chicken bone with her fingers and it was in all the papers, and suddenly it was
done
? That’s haute Wasp.”

Lesje feels she’ll never be able to master nuances like these. William with his wines: full-bodied, bouquet. It all tastes like wine to her. Maybe Nate Schoenhof is haute Wasp, though somehow she doesn’t think so. He’s too hesitant, he talks too much, he looks around the room at the wrong moments. He probably doesn’t even know what haute Wasp means.

Maybe Elizabeth doesn’t either. Maybe this is part of being haute Wasp: you don’t have to know.

“What about Chris?” she says. Surely the fact of Chris does not fit in with Marianne’s definition.

“Chris?” says Marianne. “Chris was the chauffeur.”

Y
es, I know I’ve suffered an unusual shock. I’m quite aware of that, I can feel the waves. I realize it was an act directed ostensibly at me though not really at me, childhood imprintings being what they are, though I can’t say I know of any in his case that would account for it. He had a bad childhood but who didn’t? I also realize that my reactions are normal under the circumstances and that he intended me to feel guilty and that I am not really guilty. Of that. I’m not sure whether or not I do feel guilty. I feel angry, from time to time; otherwise I feel devoid. I feel as though energy is being constantly drained out of me, as though I’m leaking electricity. I know I’m not responsible and that there’s little I could have done and that he might have killed me or Nate or the children instead of himself. I knew that at the time, and no, I did not phone the police or the mental hygiene authorities. They wouldn’t have believed me. I know all these things.

I know I have to keep on living and I have no intention of doing otherwise. You don’t have to worry about that. If I were going to
take a carving knife to my wrists or do a swan dive off the Bloor Street Viaduct I’d have done it before now. I’m a mother if not exactly a wife and I take that seriously. I would never leave an image like that behind for my children. I’ve had that done to me and I didn’t like it.

No, I don’t want to discuss my mother, my father, my Auntie Muriel or my sister. I know quite a lot about them as well. I’ve already been down this particular yellow brick road a couple of times, and what I found out mostly was that there’s no Wizard of Oz. My mother, my father, my aunt and my sister did not go away. Chris won’t go away either.

I am an adult and I do not think I am merely the sum of my past. I can make choices and I suffer the consequences, though they aren’t always the ones I foresaw. That doesn’t mean I have to like it.

No thank you. I don’t want pills to help me through. I don’t wish to have my mood changed. I could describe this mood to you in detail but I’m not sure that would be of any benefit either to you or to myself.

Elizabeth sits on the grey bench in the Ossington subway station, black leather hands folded in her lap, feet in their boots placed neatly. Her tone, she knows, is slightly belligerent and she isn’t sure why. The first time she ran through this conversation, sitting in her office that morning, she was totally calm. Having thus concluded that the psychiatrist Nate has so kindly decided she ought to see has nothing either to give her or to tell her, she phoned and canceled the appointment.

She’s using the time she’s freed to go home early. She will wrap Christmas presents, hiding the packages under the bed before the children get home from school. Already she knows the crackle of paper, the brightness of the ribbons, will be almost more than she can bear, those stars, blue and red and white, burning her eyes as if
there’s no atmosphere. It’s the hope, the false promise of hope she can’t tolerate. Everything is worse at Christmas; it always has been. But she’ll get through it, she can depend on Nate to help in that, if in little else.

Perhaps this is what they’re heading for: companionship, a thin arm extended, leaned on, two old people carefully descending from the front porch, one icy stair at a time. She’ll make sure he takes his stomach pills and will monitor his intake of booze, he’ll ask her to turn up her hearing aid and will read her amusing anecdotes from the daily papers. Military coups, massacres, that sort of thing. On weeknights they’ll watch American sitcoms on television. They’ll have photograph albums and when the children come over on Sundays with their own children these albums will be dredged out and they will all look at the photos, beaming; and seeing the picture of herself as she is today, this very instant, sitting here in the Ossington subway station waiting for the northbound bus, with the dim light filtering through the film of ash and oil on the plate-glass windows, she will sense again this chasm opening in herself. Then they will have a lunch of creamed salmon on toast, with eggs grated on top, a dish suited to their limited budget. Nate will play with the grandchildren and she will do the dishes by herself in the kitchenette, feeling Chris’s breath as usual on the back of her neck.

Almost better to think of herself alone, in a small apartment, with her bowls and a few plants. No, that would be worse. If Nate were with her, at least there would be something moving. Keep moving, they said to those almost frozen, those who had taken too many pills, those in shock. U-Haul, An Adventure in Moving. I want to be moved. Move me.
We are the numb. Long years ago/We did this or that. And now we sit
.

The evening before, she knocked at the door of Nate’s room, holding a pair of socks he’d dropped in the living room, presumably because they were wet. When he opened the door, he had no
shirt on. Suddenly she, who hadn’t wanted him to touch her for over two years, who’d found his long sparse body mildly repellant, who had chosen instead the thick, matted, richly veined flesh of Chris, who had rearranged time and space so that this torso she was now confronted with need never confront her, closeted as it was in an area clearly marked off from hers – she wanted him to wind his arms around her, string on bone but warm bone, press her, comfort and rock her. She wanted to say: Can anything be saved? Meaning this wreck. But he’d stepped back and she’d merely held out the socks, wearily, mutely, as usual.

Once she was always able to tell if he was in the house, whether she could actually hear him or not. Now she no longer can. He’s absent more often now, and when he is there his presence is like light from a star that moved on thousands of light-years before: a phantom. He no longer, for instance, brings her cups of tea. They still give each other Christmas presents, though. The children would be disturbed if this ritual were omitted. She’s finally bought him something for this year. It’s a silver cigarette case. She thinks perversely of the contrast: the silver case emerging from his frayed pocket under the raveling sweater. Once he’d given her nightgowns, always a size too large, as if he thought her breasts were bigger than they were. Now it’s books. On some neutral subject he assumes will interest her: antiques, pressed glass, quilts.

“Ready for Christmas?”

There’s a man sitting beside Elizabeth. He’s been sitting there for several minutes; she saw him as a brownish blur to the left, registered the shift as he crossed and recrossed his legs. Movement like rustlings in a hedge, furtive, almost not there. She turns her head, slightly, briefly, to look at him. He’s wearing a brown topcoat, a little too small for him – it must pinch under the arms – and a brown hat. His eyes shine at her, brown also and small, like raisins. His hands,
gloveless, dark hair on the knuckles, rest on the thick suitcase he holds across his lap.

She smiles. A long time ago she learned to smile easily, graciously, it takes no effort. “Not quite. No one ever is, are they?”

The man nudges closer to her, his buttocks inching along the bench. She feels a slight pressure at her side.

“You look as if you’re waiting for someone,” he says.

“No,” she says, “I’m not waiting for anyone. Only the bus.”

“I think we must be neighbors,” he says. “I’m sure I’ve seen you on the street.”

“I don’t think so,” Elizabeth says.

“I’m sure I have. I wouldn’t forget.” He lowers his voice. “A woman like you.”

Elizabeth shifts away from the pressure against her thigh. Her other thigh is now against the arm of the bench. She can always stand up. But he begins immediately to talk about real estate values. This is harmless enough, and Elizabeth knows something about it. They both bought around the same time, it seems, both experienced the tortures of renovation, though he’s done his living-room floor in cork tile, a choice Elizabeth herself would not have made. He tells a story about his contractor, the lies, the failures to show up, the deficient wiring. Elizabeth relaxes, leaning back against the bench. He’s ordinary enough, but it’s a relief to talk with someone practical, someone who can accomplish things. Simple competence, feet on the ground.
Bedrock
.

The man has children, he says, three of them, and a wife. They discuss the local school. He likes to read, he tells her, but only non-fiction. Books about history, famous crimes, the world wars. He asks her what she thinks about the results of the Quebec election. “They’ll never pull it off,” he says. “Too much debt.”

“Probably,” says Elizabeth, whose attention is wandering now that there’s no threat.

“We could have a drink sometime,” he says abruptly.

Elizabeth sits up. “I don’t think …” she says.

“You wouldn’t regret it,” he says, his eyes shining. He leans towards her confidentially. Sweet brandy on his breath. “I know,” he says. “I know what you want. You might not think so to look at me, but I know.”

“Right now I don’t want anything,” Elizabeth says, realizing at once that this is false. What she wants is to want something.

“All right,” says the man. “If you change your mind, let me know.” He hands her a little card, which she holds in her gloved hand without looking at it. “The office number,” he says.

“I’ll do that,” Elizabeth says, laughing, turning it into a joke. She can taste the brandy in his mouth, blue flame flickering over her tongue. She looks at the card. There’s a name, two numbers, nothing more.

“What do you do?” she asks, clutching at work, the objective world.