Life Before Man (18 page)

Lesje closes her eyes, sees before her the articulated skeletons of the Museum exhibits, wired into a grotesque semblance of life. Who could possibly object to a copulation that took place ninety million years ago? The love lives of stones, sex among the ossified. Yet she could see how such gargantuan passions, the earth actually moving, a single nostril filling the screen, sighs of lust like a full-blast factory whistle, might be upsetting to some. She remembers the Grade Four teacher who threw out the toad eggs she’d brought to school. She’d
hoped to describe to the class how she’d seen them being laid, in a ditch, the huge female toad gripped by a male so small it looked like a different animal. The teacher listened to this recital
solo
, then said she didn’t think the class really needed to know about things like that. As usual Lesje had accepted the adult verdict and watched mutely while the teacher carried her jar of precious toad eggs out of the room to flush them down the girls’ toilet.

Why didn’t they need to know about things like that? Lesje now wonders. What do they need to know about? Probably not much. Certainly not the questions that occur to her at times of free-ranging speculation. Did dinosaurs have penises, for instance? A good question. Their descendants the birds have cloacal openings, whereas some snakes have not only one penis but two. Did the male dinosaur hold the female dinosaur by the scruff of the neck, like a rooster? Did dinosaurs herd, did they mate for life like geese, did they have harems, did male dinosaurs fight each other at mating season? Perhaps that would help to explain the modified third claw on Deinonychus. Lesje decides not to raise these questions. Dinosaurs laid eggs, like turtles, and that will be that.

William says he’s still hungry and is going into the kitchen to make himself a sandwich. This is an expression of dissatisfaction with Lesje’s ability to meet his requirements: Lesje knows it but doesn’t care. Ordinarily she would make the sandwich for him, since William has always claimed to be one big thumb in the kitchen. He will manage to break something out there or cut his finger on a sardine can (William, foe of cans, nevertheless has a periodic hankering for sardines that must be catered to). There will be wreckage and carnage, wounds, mutterings and curses; William will emerge with a tatty sandwich, blood-smeared uneven bread, sardine oil on his shirt. He will display himself, he’ll wish to be appeased, and Lesje, she knows, will do this. In the absence of Nate, who
has offered, when she comes to think of it, nothing at all. A wide plain. A risk.

The phone rings and William gets to it before Lesje is even out of her chair. “It’s for you,” he says.

Lesje, chest gripped by a fit of shallow breathing, seizes the phone.

“Hello,” says a woman’s voice. “This is Elizabeth Schoenhof.”

Lesje’s throat closes. She’s been found out. Grandmothers converge on her, holding out her guilt, their grief.

But far from it. Elizabeth is merely inviting her to dinner. Her and William, of course. Nate and Elizabeth, says Elizabeth, would both be very happy if they could come.

E
lizabeth is having lunch with Martha in the orange cafeteria of the Museum. They’re both eating sparingly: soup, fruit yogurt, tea. Elizabeth has insisted on paying. Martha has not fought her for half of the bill as she once would have. It’s a sign of her defeat.

So is the fact that they’re eating here at all. The Museum cafeteria is nothing special. Once, in the days of Martha’s ascendancy, when Elizabeth thought she might be a real threat, she’d gone to considerable trouble to make sure they met for these lunches in good restaurants, where Elizabeth could demonstrate her own knowledge of the superior menu and get Martha slightly bombed on cocktails and wine. Martha doesn’t hold her liquor very well and Elizabeth has found this useful. She would sip delicately at the edge of her own wine glass while Martha downed the carafe, priming herself and finally spewing out a lot more than she should have about Nate’s activities and imperfections. Every time Martha said something unflattering about Nate, Elizabeth would nod and murmur agreement, even though these criticisms irritated her, reflecting as they did on her taste in husbands; and Martha’s eyes
would dampen with gratitude. Not that Martha likes her. Neither of them has any illusions about that. Soon she will not have to take Martha to lunch at all; coffee will be sufficient. After that, she will have dentist’s appointments. Lots of them.

Elizabeth has removed the dishes from her tray and set them out on an unfolded napkin, but Martha has no time today for such niceties. She eats from the tray, slurping her soup, her square face bunched into a scowl. Her dark hair is stringy, pulled back and clamped to her scalp with a tortoise-shell plastic clip. She looks brownish, pinched; hardly the confident peasant, hearty and wide-chested, that Elizabeth had first found herself having to deal with. She’s here to complain about Nate, as if Nate has broken a window with a baseball and Elizabeth is his mother.

“I hit him,” Martha is saying, “right between the eyes. I guess I shouldn’t have, but it felt good. He’s a prick, you know. Underneath all that
understanding
stuff. I don’t know how you can live with him.”

Once Elizabeth would have agreed; now, however, she can allow herself a few luxuries. Poor Nate, she thinks. He’s such an innocent. “He’s a sensational father,” she says. “You couldn’t ask for a better one. The girls adore him.”

“I wouldn’t know,” says Martha. She bites savagely into her cracker; brittle flakes sprinkle the tray. No class, Elizabeth thinks; she never did have any. Elizabeth has always known that sooner or later Martha would overplay her hand. She herself tries for understatement. She opens her peach yogurt and stirs the contents up from the bottom.

“I never understood at first why you were so nice to me,” Martha says, with a little of her old belligerence. “Taking me out to lunch and so forth. I couldn’t see it. I mean, if I was you I wouldn’t have done that.”

“I believe in being civilized about these things,” Elizabeth says.

“But then I figured it out. You wanted to
supervise
us. Like some kind of playground organizer. Make sure it didn’t go too far. Right? You can admit it now, it’s all over.”

Elizabeth frowns slightly. She doesn’t like this interpretation of her motives, though it may be just slightly accurate. “I hardly think that’s fair, Martha,” she says. Behind Martha, something of more interest is taking place. Lesje Green has come in with the Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology, Dr. Van Vleet. They’re going along the counter now, filling their trays. They often have lunch together; everyone knows there’s nothing to it, since Dr. Van Vleet is about ninety and Lesje is known to be living with a young man who works at the Ministry of the Environment. They have lunch together presumably because they can’t find anyone else to talk to about the old rocks and bones they’re both so stuck on.

Elizabeth has always found Lesje hard to deal with: strange, sometimes pedantic, skittish. Too specialized. Today, however, she follows her with more than usual interest. The tipoff, now that she’s thought about it, was that visit to the Museum back in November. The children told her about the dinosaur lady who showed them around, but Nate hadn’t mentioned her. He’d asked Elizabeth to go with them, which didn’t fit; but Nate is such a bungler it’s the kind of thing he would do. Increasingly he has that mooning look, he’s rubbing against the furniture. She’s almost certain she’s right, and tomorrow evening she’ll know.

“We were supposed to be having these heart-to-hearts,” Martha is saying, “but we never did, really, did we? I mean, we’d both say a lot about
him
, but I never said what I thought about you and you never said what you thought about me. We were never really honest, isn’t that right?”

Martha is itching for honesty right now, she’d like a shouting match, right here in the cafeteria. Elizabeth wishes Nate had picked a ladyfriend with more sense of style. But a legal secretary at a
two-bit lawyer’s office, what could you expect? Elizabeth herself has no time for honesty right now. She doesn’t think it would serve any purpose to tell Martha her real opinions, and she already knows what Martha thinks about her.

But in any contest she knows she would win. Martha has only one vocabulary, the one she uses; but Elizabeth has two. The genteel chic she’s acquired, which is a veneer but a useful one: insinuating, flexible, accommodating. And another language altogether, older, harder, left over from those streets and schoolyards on the far edge of gentility where she fought it out after each one of her parents’ quick decampments.

These fast moves were done at night, to avoid witnesses and landlords. Elizabeth would fall asleep on a pile of her mother’s unpacked dresses, beautiful frail dresses left over from some earlier time, and wake up knowing she would have to go out into the strange faces, the ritual tests. If anyone pushed her she pushed back twice as hard, and if anyone pushed Caroline she put her head down and charged, right in the pit of the stomach. She could get big kids that way, even boys. They never expected it from someone that short. Sometimes she lost, but not often. She lost when there were more than two against her.

“You’re turning into a hooligan,” her mother said in one of her spasms of self-pity, dabbing at blood. In those days Elizabeth was always bleeding. Not that there was anything her mother could do about it; or about much else. Elizabeth’s grandfather helped out while he was alive, though he said her father was a rounder, but Auntie Muriel got hold of him in the last months of his life and he changed his will. That’s what Elizabeth’s mother said, after the funeral.

Then they moved again, to an even smaller apartment, and her mother wandered helplessly around the cramped living room carrying things, a teapot, a stocking, which she didn’t know where to
set down. “It’s not what I’m used to,” she said. She went to bed with a headache; this time there was a bed. Elizabeth’s father came home with two other men and told her a joke:
What did the chickens say when their mother laid an orange? Look at the orange marmalade
.

No one put Elizabeth to bed, but no one usually did. Sometimes her father pretended to, but it was only an excuse to fall asleep across her bed with all his clothes on. Her mother got up again and they all sat around in the living room drinking. Elizabeth was used to this. In her nightgown she sat on one of the men’s laps, his bristly skin against her check. He called her “baby.” Her mother got up to go to the little girls’ room, she said, and tripped over her father’s foot. He put it there on purpose: he liked practical jokes. “Most beautiful woman in the world,” he said, laughing, picking her up from the linoleum whose pattern of maroon and yellow tapestry flowers Elizabeth can see whenever she wants to. He gave her a loose kiss on the cheek, winking; the other men laughed. Elizabeth’s mother started to cry, her thin hands covering the porcelain face.

“You’re a turd,” Elizabeth said to her father. The other men laughed even more at this.

“You don’t mean it, your poor old dad,” he said. He tickled her under the armpits. The next morning he was gone. It was after this that space became discontinuous.

Almost no one knows any of this about Elizabeth. They don’t know she’s a refugee, with a refugee’s desperate habits. Nate knows a little of it. Chris knew it, finally. Martha doesn’t, neither does Lesje, and this gives Elizabeth a large advantage. She knows there’s nothing in her that will compel her to behave decently. She can speak from that other life if she has to. If pushed she’ll stop at nothing. Or, put another way: when she reaches nothing she will stop.

Two tables away, Lesje walks towards them, her tray listing badly, that otherworldly expression on her face which probably means she’s thinking obscure thoughts but which reminds Elizabeth of someone having a minor epileptic fit. She sits down, almost knocking over her coffee cup with one of those gawky elbows. Elizabeth quickly appraises her clothes: jeans again. Lesje can get away with it, she’s skinny enough. Also she’s only a curatorial assistant. Elizabeth herself must dress more responsibly.

“Excuse me, Martha,” she says. “There’s someone I have to speak to.” Martha, balked, rips the tinfoil top from her yogurt cup.

Elizabeth walks softly, puts her hand on Lesje’s checkered shoulder, says “Lesje.”

Lesje shrieks and drops her spoon on the table. “Oh,” she says, turning.

“Can’t come up behind her,” says Dr. Van Vleet. “Learned that a long time ago. Trial and error.”

“I’m so sorry,” Elizabeth says. “I just wanted to say how pleased we both are that you’ll be able to make it tomorrow.”

Lesje nods, finally manages to say, “So am I, I mean, we both are.” Elizabeth smiles graciously at Dr. Van Vleet and pauses beside Martha just long enough to say how pleasant it has been to see her again and she hopes they can get together soon; she’s sorry, but she has to get back to the office now.

She feels very calm. She will manage.

She works in her office all afternoon, dictating memos and filling out request forms and typing a few special letters that need more thought. They’ve given a definite yes to the Chinese Peasant Art exhibit, which will now need some groundwork; but China is good copy these days and the show should be easy to promote.

Just before closing time she covers her typewriter and gathers her purse and coat. There’s one more project she’s promised herself she will take care of today.

She goes up the stairs, through the wooden door that keeps out the public, along the corridor with the metal drawers on either side. Chris’s workroom. Another man works here now. He looks up from the table as Elizabeth comes towards him. Small, balding, not at all like Chris.

“Can I help you?” he says.

“I’m Elizabeth Schoenhof,” Elizabeth says. “I work in Special Projects. I was wondering if you had a few spare scraps of fur. Any kind will do. My children use them for dolls’ dresses.”

The man smiles and gets up to look. Elizabeth has been told his name but she’s forgotten it: Nagle? She will look it up. It’s part of her job to know the technicians in every department, in case she needs to use them for anything.