Object of Your Love (7 page)

It was a breezy afternoon. Outside, a golden rain was now falling from the willow trees. The sweet, heavy smell of apples, rotting in the long, cold grass, drifted in through the windows. Hedda had thought, every day for a year she had thought about what she'd say if Dempster ever came back. She'd thought she had something prepared, but now she only said, “You've gained weight.”

Dempster laughed ruefully, looking down at himself. “I know. I look terrible.”

“No, you don't,” she said quickly. “Really. Your face—your face looks younger this way. No, you look good.” She sounded so fragile and innocent, she looked so
wronged
that Dempster hated himself for leaving her. He glanced around, impressed.

“You've been working hard.”

“For a few months.”

She could have told him that she had a dealer in Toronto now, and that another one in Vancouver was taking a serious look at her work. This was what she'd thought she might tell him if he'd come to the gallery, to her recent show. But she didn't say it now. It was still good news, but it belonged to her.

Dempster stepped forward, anxious to speak. “I wondered,” he said. “I wondered about moving back in with you.”

“You've got tired of this Suzie, then?”

Dempster laughed, laughed at himself. “I'm not sure she needs me. She has such equilibrium. I have the feeling all the time that if I weren't there, she'd be just as happy. Maybe we're too much like each other. Life can get dull in that sort of relationship. Suzie doesn't have your depths, Hedda. I miss the intensity of living with you.”

Hedda looked around at the kitchen. For some time she'd been working there. Why stay in the basement when she had the whole house to herself? There was clay everywhere, cans of paint, vats of water, tools, the plywood she cut up to make bases, a saw leaning in a corner, drifts of sawdust on the floor, lumber in the hallway for the construction of shipping crates.

Dempster read her mind. “I love things just the way they are,” he assured her. “I always missed you when you worked downstairs. I always felt cut off. This way I could watch you. I don't care about the mess. No, really, it's perfect this way.”

Hedda looked at him, dangerously tempted. Of course she still loved him. There was nothing she wanted more than to take him back. But she said, “You were right. The only way I can survive is to depend on myself. If you come back, I'll start to rely on you. I'm afraid of your strength. I know now that I can't live with anyone. I'm ready to accept that. I've got a new prescription. I'm stable enough to keep myself from eating a bottle of pills in one sitting.”

“But you're alone here. You can't be happy.”

“Perhaps not. But I feel more at peace with myself than ever before. I'm not lonely. My mind keeps my heart company. This seems to be as good as life gets.”

Soon, she thought, she'd have enough money to buy out Dempster's interest in the house. This was the best place for her, here where the light was palpable, the air musical with the cricket's song, and the river flowed by, with its power to give life and to take it away.

OBJECT OF YOUR LOVE

“A
ND, DEAR LORD
,” says my brother Floyd at dinner, “let us pray for our beloved father, who is in exile in the United States, and hope that he'll return to us some day.”

“You don't know
where
he is,” I say. “For all you know he's dead.”

Mother, Floyd and his wife Blanche raise their eyes warily and look at me. It is a September evening and their faces are thrown back into the room by the black kitchen windows: Floyd with his brittle Christian smile disclosing a mouthful of tiny rotting teeth, Blanche batting her fleshy eyelids at me in disapproval, Mother swallowing a small, anxious, let's-not-fight gulp of air. Blanche and Floyd grip Mother's bony hands in prayer, holding her arms high, like a prize-fighter in a boxing ring. Mother wears the expression of surprise and reluctant salvation of a suicide victim pulled from a river. She joined Floyd's church a year ago.

“You brought us up as atheists,” I reminded her at the time. “How can you go against everything you ever taught us?”

She shrugged. “It's made my life easier. Floyd doesn't pester me any more. Maybe you should consider it yourself.”

“I'd sooner take poison.”

Ten years ago Father ran away. At the time, I was twenty, Floyd twenty-five. Weeks after he disappeared we realized he'd taken Floyd's credit card with him. We were able to trace his progress through the States by reading the credit card bill: a gasoline purchase in Watertown, New York. Dinner in Syracuse. Motel rooms in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia.

“He's following the Interstate 81,” I said, examining an atlas. “He's taking his time. Probably headed for Florida.”

“I hope he's not ill,” Mother fretted, referring to a pharmacy purchase that appeared on the bill. She is a simple, unquestioning woman who does not always grasp the magnitude of things.

“Now,” said Blanche with extraordinary insight, “we'll be able to tell people we have relatives in Florida.”

Floyd said he wasn't angry with Father for running up his credit card bill. “He didn't mean any harm,” he said.

“Floyd,” I shook my head, “you are a simpleton.”

“If you were in touch with God,” he smiled at me with gentle pity, “you'd know how to forgive.” Floyd is small, fastidious, womanish, tiny-boned, a physical weakling with round wire-rimmed glasses and a red goatee. He has grown a beard because he thinks it makes him look biblical, but he lacks the moral presence of a holy man.

Floyd got religion in his early twenties. He was working then at the dairy. He became so crazed with God that he marched around the dairy crying, “Praise the Lord, brother! Hallelujah, sister!” his face blazing with religious fervour. He sang hymns on the job. He tried to get a prayer group going at lunch break. One day he put proselytizing flyers in the empty milk bottles riding down the conveyor belt. That was when they fired him.

Now he is a lay preacher in the Church of the Risen Christ. He assists the minister: opens the church up on Sundays, greets worshippers at the door, counts the collection money, that sort of thing. He teaches Sunday school and gives the Scripture readings at services. Once in a while, they let him give a sermon. For this, they pay him a small salary.

Floyd and Blanche have a tiny apartment over near the bus depot but they are always at our place. The apartment, they say, makes them restless, there's nothing to do there. I can't blame them for being bored with each other. Floyd reads the Bible all day and Blanche wants to watch television but their set is broken. At our house, she turns on the
TV
and sinks down onto the sofa, an enormous woman with long black hairs clinging like spiders to the corners of her mouth. Her body is, itself, like a piece of furniture in its cumber-someness and inertia, its soft preponderance. She is like an armchair swollen with cotton wadding. All afternoon she watches the game shows, a plate of Mother's lemon squares balanced on her knee.

“They need a child to distract them,” Mother says of Blanche and Floyd.

“They're children themselves,” I tell her.

“And, brethren,” Floyd says at dinner, his eyelids fluttering with piety, “let us bow our heads once more, for we are not finished with the Lord's work at this table. We will pray for our sister, Jean, that she may open her heart to the love of God—”

I push my chair back. “I'll take my plate to my room rather than sit here listening to this rot.”

“Before you go,” interrupts Blanche, “could you pass the mashed potatoes?”

Around nine o'clock, I hear the front door close. I go to the head of the stairs. “Are the idiots gone?” I call down.

“Do you mean Blanche and Floyd?” replies Mother.

Once, I thought they'd left and they hadn't. “Are the idiots gone?” I called down.

“No,” Blanche answered without thinking. “We're still here.”

*   *   *

On the weekends, Mother and I lead a quiet life. Mother rises late and drifts from room to room in her mules and thick flannelette nightgown. She stands at the kitchen window, motionless, looking out at Father's bird feeder, at the chickadees, cardinals, blue jays, the hardy, faithful birds who will abide the Canadian winter with us. Their bright wings, their swiftness, their greed entertain her. For a long time she stands fixed at the window, thinking no doubt of Father, perhaps believing that as long as we feed the birds in his stead, there is hope that one day he will fly back to us.

Pressed to the cold windowsill as though frozen there, Mother's fingers turn as white as bones. A circle of vapour forms on the glass where her face comes close to it, her lips moving in silent entreaty. Later, she sits in her swivel rocker and says her prayers, reading from a small scarlet book. Around noon she takes a bath in an inch of tepid water. “Fill the tub up,” I call to her through the bathroom door. “Pour in the hot. Spoil yourself. Enjoy your bath.” “I don't want to waste water,” she says. Her skin has gotten very thin, slippery and loose. Like an old silk suit that doesn't fit her any more, it ripples and sags. On the backs of her hands, there are big brown spots the size of coppers. She can pinch the skin there and pull it away a distance of an inch. The hair has fallen out of her arms and legs. She is smooth as a newborn baby.

After lunch, she puts on her clothes, thin sweaters that do not keep her warm. Thick ones are too heavy, she says, she cannot support their punishing weight. They exhaust her. In her inadequate cardigan, she shivers, rises to turn up the thermostat on the living-room wall. She sits again in her chair and reads large-print books borrowed from the library, blinking at the heavy black lettering, her legs extended straight out in front of her, her heels, supported by a footstool, pressed together, the toes of her shoes pointing up at the ceiling. She reaches to turn on the radio.

In our kitchen cupboards there are tins of peanut brittle, cookies with a dot of strawberry jam in the centre, bags of jelly beans, Oh Henry chocolate bars. These are the things Mother wants. She eats very little. Though she can't finish dinner, at the end of the meal she always says, “What is there for dessert? I have to have something sweet with my tea.” Her day builds up into this little hill with something sweet on the top. Outside of sugar, she is not interested in food. She says she can't taste anything, is never hungry. It is as though her system is dormant, as though all her bodily functions have ground to a halt. No longer does she perspire or menstruate or get up in the night to relieve herself.

*   *   *

Late on a wet, dark September afternoon, I am reviewing inventory before a large window in the back room of the dentist's office where I work as an assistant. The office is downtown, just off King Street, in an old, picturesque Victorian house with peaked gables and white spindle porch rails. It is a cozy office, with crooked walls, modern, muted lighting, small, impractical examination rooms, soft music floating from invisible speakers, grey silencing broadloom on the floors.

It is 5:15. Dr. Peter Beveridge steps into the room and closes in behind me, swift and silent as a leopard after its prey. “Everyone's gone home,” he whispers into the hollow of my neck. I myself have heard the last of the staff preparing to leave, the singing of empty coat hangers set swinging on the cloakroom rod, the hum of the evening traffic flowing in through the front door as it is opened again and again.
Good night, good night.

Dr. Peter Beveridge spreads his hands on my hips with much the same professional authority I have seen him employ in pressing rebellious patients into the dental chair. On my neck I feel his breath, which smells, I have noticed recently, like the powders he packs into the dental cavities of his patients. The scent is on his fingers, it seems to come out of his pores. I have a mental picture of this compound slowly flowing through his veins, a white, chalky substance.

“I want you to leave Mrs. Beveridge,” I say without turning around. We are reflected together in the windowpane before us, he a foot taller than I and brilliant as light in his white smock. Recently he has holidayed in Mexico, returning with his face bronzed and healthy. I look at his reflection and shake with desire. For three years I have worshipped him like a god: his height, his powerful shoulders, his square, clean jaw, his moist, brown eyes, his sculptured hair, his tan, his good fortune, his income.

Dr. Peter Beveridge sighs. “Oh, Jean,” he says gently but firmly. He is fifteen years older than I and sometimes talks to me as though he were my father or my analyst. “You feel depressed today,” he tells me. “It's just the rain.” We are looking out the window at the bank parking lot next door, where a diagonal rain is falling and the wind has driven huge orange leaves flat against a wire fence.

“It's not the rain,” I say impatiently. In the parking lot, cars arrive and depart, their headlights shining in the gathering dusk. People run in and out of the bank, their collars turned up against the weather. Through the enormous plate-glass bank windows, I can see the customers shuffling forward between crimson ropes to the tall counters, talking to the tellers, carrying on their common, innocent transactions, preparing to dash out once more to their cars and drive home in the steady, inching traffic, cook dinner, turn on their television sets, spend the evening with their husbands and wives and children. That is all I want, I think: a normal life.

If I let him, Dr. Beveridge will draw me out to reception, where there are warm lights and a long couch, behind which, in a large aquarium, jewel-coloured fish glide slowly through illuminated water. The fish have a tranquillizing effect on patients, especially those coming to us for invasive procedures such as extractions, implants, crowns. Dr. Peter Beveridge will snap the front door lock, pull the drapes in the bow window overlooking the street, hang the Closed sign on the door, like a shopkeeper preparing to take inventory. He will lay me down on the couch and apply himself to me while the fish swim round and round.