Montreal Stories (41 page)

I think no one but me could hear. Lapwing, on the far side of Fergus, was calling some new argument to the Biesels; Mr. Chadwick was busy with a waiter; and David was lost in his private climate of drizzle and mist.

“What shrimp?” said Edie. “You mean Harry?”

“If I say ‘the rest of your life,’ I must mean your husband.”

“We’re not really married,” Edie said. “I’m his common-law wife, but only in places where they recognize common law. Like, I can have ‘Lapwing’ in my passport, but I couldn’t be a Lapwing in Quebec. That’s because in Quebec they just have civil law. I’m still married to Morrie Ringer there. Legally, I mean. You’ve never heard of him? You’re a Canadian, and you’ve never heard of Morrie Ringer? The radio personality? ‘The Ringer Singalong’? That’s his most famous program. They even pick it up in Cleveland. Well, he can’t live with me, can’t forget me, won’t divorce me. Anyway, the three of us put together haven’t got enough money for a real divorce. You can’t get a divorce in Quebec. You have to do some complicated, expensive thing. When you break up one marriage and set up another, it takes money. It’s expensive to live by the rules—I don’t care what you say.” So far, he had said scarcely anything, and not about that. “In a way, it’s as if I was Morrie’s girl and Harry’s wife. Morrie could never stand having meals in the house. We ate out. I lived for about two years on smoked meat and pickles. With Harry, I’ve been more the wife type. It’s all twisted around.”

“That’s not what you’re like,” said Fergus.

“Twisted around?”

“Wife type. I’ve been married. I never could stand them. Wife types.” He made a scooping movement with his hand and spread his palm flat.

In the falsetto men assume when they try to imitate a woman’s voice, he addressed a miniature captive husband:

“From now on, you’ve got to work for me, and no more girlfriends.”

“Some women are like that,” said Edie. “I’m not.”

“Does the shrimp work for you?”

“We don’t think that way. He works for himself. In a sense, for me. He wants me to have my own intellectual life. I’ve been studying. I’ve studied a few things.” She looked past him, like a cat.

“What few things?”

“Well … I learned a few things about the Cistercians. There was a book in a room Harry and I rented in London. Someone left it behind. So, I know a few things.”

“Just keep those few things to yourself, whatever they may be. Was your father one?”

“A monk? You must be a Catholic, or you wouldn’t make that sort of a joke. My father—I hardly know what to think about him. He won’t have anything to do with me. Morrie was Jewish, and my father didn’t like that. Then I left Morrie for a sort of Baptist Communist. That was even worse. He used to invite Morrie for Christmas dinner, but he won’t have Harry in the house. I can’t help what my father feels. You can’t live on someone else’s idea of what’s right.”

“You say all those things as though they were simple,” he said. “Look, can you get away?”

She glanced once round the table; her eyes swept past me. She looked back at Fergus and said, “I’ll try.” She lifted her hair with both hands. “I’ll tell Harry the truth. I’ll say I want to show you the inside of the church. We were in it the other night. That’s the truth.”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant, leave him and come to me.”

“Leave Harry?”

“You aren’t married to him,” Fergus said. “I’m not talking about a few minutes or a week or a vacation. I mean, leave him and come to Spain and live with me.”

“Whereabouts in Spain?” she said.

“Madrid. I’ve got a place. You’ll be all right.”

“As what? Wife or girlfriend?”

“Anything you want.”

She let go her hair, and laughed, and said, “I was just kidding. I don’t know you. I’ve already left somebody. You can’t keep doing that, on and on. Besides, Harry loves me.”

We were joined now by Michael Hagen-Beck. The stir caused by his arrival may have seemed welcoming, but it was merely surprise. On the way to the restaurant Mrs. Biesel had set forth considerable disapproval of the way he had left the concert before the Ravel. Lily had defended him (she believed he had gone to look for a bathroom and felt too shy to come back), but Lapwing had said gravely, “I’m afraid Hagen-Beck will have to be wiped off the board,” and I had pictured him turning in a badge of some kind and slinking out of class.

He nodded in the curt way that is supposed to conceal diffidence but that usually means a sour nature, removed the empty chair next to David, dragged it to the far end of the table, and wedged it between Mrs. Biesel and Lily.

“Hey, there’s Hagen-Beck,” said Lapwing, as if he were astonished to find him this side of the Atlantic.

“I’m afraid he is too late for the soup,” said Mr. Chadwick.

“He won’t care,” said Lapwing. “He’d sooner talk than eat. He’s brilliant. He’s going to show us all up, one day. Well, he may show some people up. Not everybody.”

Lily sat listening to Hagen-Beck, her cheek on her hand. In the dying light her hair looked silvery. I could hear him telling her that he had been somewhere around the North Sea, to the home of his ancestors, a fishing village of superior poverty. He spoke of herrings—how many are caught and sold
in a year, how many devoured by seagulls. Beauty is in the economics of Nature, he said. Nowhere else.

“But isn’t what people build beautiful, too?” said Lily, pleading for the cracked and faded church.

A waiter brought candles, deepening the color of the night and altering the shade and tone of the women’s skin and hair.

“This calls for champagne,” Mr. Chadwick said, in a despairing voice.

David had not touched the fish soup or the fresh langouste especially ordered for him. He stared at his plate, and sometimes down the table to the wall of candlelight, behind which Lily and Hagen-Beck sat talking quietly. Mr. Chadwick looked where David was looking. I saw that he had just made a complex and understandable mistake; he thought that David was watching Hagen-Beck, that it was for Hagen-Beck he had tried to keep the empty chair.

“Great idea, champagne,” said Lapwing, once he had made certain Mr. Chadwick was paying for it. “We haven’t toasted David’s wonderful performance this afternoon.” From a man who detested the very idea of music, this was a remarkable sign of good will.

Hagen-Beck would not drink wine, probably because it had been unknown to his ancestors. Summoning a waiter, who had better things to do, he asked for water—not false, bottled water but the real kind, God’s kind, out of a tap. It was brought to him, in a wine-stained carafe. Two buckets of ice containing champagne had meanwhile been placed on the table, one of them fatally close to Fergus. The wine was opened and poured. Hagen-Beck swallowed water. Mr. Chadwick struck his glass with a knife: he was about to estrange David still further by making a speech.

Fergus and Edie, deep in some exchange, failed to hear the call for silence. In the sudden hush at our table Edie said distinctly, “When I was a kid, we made our own Christmas garlands and decorations. We’d start in November, the whole
family. We made birds out of colored paper, and tied them to branches, and hung the branches all over the house. We spent our evenings that way, making these things. Now my father won’t even open my Christmas cards. My mother writes to me, and she sends me money. I wouldn’t have anything to wear if she didn’t. My father doesn’t know. Harry doesn’t know. I’ve never told it to anybody, until now.”

She must have meant “to any man,” because she had told it to Lily.

“It’s boring,” said Fergus. “That’s why you don’t tell it. Nobody cares. If you were playing an old woman, slopping on in a bathrobe and some old slippers, it might work. But here you are—golden hair, golden skin. You look carved in butter. The dress is too tight for you, though. I wouldn’t let you wear it if I had any say. And those god-awful earrings—where do they come from?”

“London, Woolworth’s.”

“Well, get rid of them. And your hair should be longer. And nobody cares about your bloody garlands. Don’t talk. Just be golden, be quiet.”

I suppose the others thought he had insulted her. I was the only one who knew what had gone on before, and how easily she had said, “Wife or girlfriend?” Lapwing merely looked interested. Another man might have challenged Fergus, or, thinking he was drunk, drawn his attention away from Edie and let it die. But Lapwing squeaked, “That’s what I keep telling her, Bray. Nobody cares! Nobody cares! Be quiet! Be quiet!”

I saw Lapwing’s heavy head bowing and lifting, and Edie’s slow expression of shock, and Fergus pouring himself, and nobody else, champagne. This time there surely must have been a flash of telepathy between two people with nothing in common. Fergus and I must have shared at least one thought: Lapwing had just opened his palm, revealing a miniature golden wife, and handed her over.

Then Edie looked at Fergus, and Fergus at Edie, and I watched her make up her mind. The spirit of William Morris surrounded the new lovers, evading his most hardworking academic snoop. Lapwing ought to have stood and quoted, “Fear shall not alter these lips and these eyes of the loved and the lover,” but he seemed to see nothing, notice nothing; or like Mr. Chadwick he continued to see and notice the wrong things.

Three of the future delinquents at our table were ex-Catholics. They took it for granted that the universe was eternal and they could gamble their lives. Whatever thin faith they still had was in endless renewal—new luck, new love. Nothing worked out for them, but even now I can see what they were after. Remembering Edie at the split second when she came to a decision, I can find it in me to envy them. The rest of us were born knowing better, which means we were stuck. When I finally looked away from her it was at another pool of candlelight, and the glowing, blooming children. I wonder now if there was anything about us for the children to remember, if they ever later on reminded one another: There was that long table of English-speaking people, still in bud.