Runaway (9 page)

When she came back, washed and tidied and reinforced, he was still there.

He spoke at once. He said that he wanted to apologize.

“It occurred to me I was rude to you. When you asked me—”

“Yes,” she said.

“You had it right,” he said. “The way you described him.”

This seemed less an offering, on his part, than a direct and necessary transaction. If she did not care to speak he might just get up and walk away, not particularly disappointed, having done what he’d come to do.

Shamefully, Juliet’s eyes overflowed with tears. This was so unexpected that she had no time to look away.

“Okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”

She nodded quickly, several times, sniffled wretchedly, blew her nose on the tissue she eventually found in her bag.

“It’s all right,” she said, and then she told him, in a straightforward way, just what had happened. How the man bent over
and asked her if the seat was taken, how he sat down, how she had been looking out the window and how she couldn’t do that any longer so she had tried or had pretended to read her book, how he had asked where she had got on the train, and found out where she lived, and kept trying to make headway with the conversation, till she just picked up and left him.

The only thing she did not reveal to him was the expression
chum around
. She had a notion that if she were to say that she would burst into tears all over again.

“People interrupt women,” he said. “Easier than men.”

“Yes. They do.”

“They think women are bound to be nicer.”

“But he just wanted somebody to talk to,” she said, shifting sides a little. “He wanted somebody worse than I
didn’t
want somebody. I realize that now. And I don’t look mean. I don’t look cruel. But I was.”

A pause, while she once more got her sniffling and her leaky eyes under control.

He said, “Haven’t you ever wanted to do that to anybody before?”

“
Yes
. But I’ve never done it. I never have gone so far. And why I did it this time—it was that he was so humble. And he had all new clothes on he’d probably bought for the trip. He was probably depressed and thought he’d go on a trip and it was a good way to meet people and make friends.

“Maybe if he’d just been going a little way—,” she said. “But he said he was going to Vancouver and I would have been saddled with him. For days.”

“Yes.”

“I really might have been.”

“Yes.”

“So.”

“Rotten luck,” he said, smiling a very little. “The first time
you get up the nerve to give somebody the gears he throws himself under a train.”

“It could have been the last straw,” she said, now feeling slightly defensive. “It could have been.”

“I guess you’ll just have to watch out, in future.”

Juliet raised her chin and looked at him steadily.

“You mean I’m exaggerating.”

Then something happened that was as sudden and unbidden as her tears. Her mouth began to twitch. Unholy laughter was rising.

“I guess it is a little extreme.”

He said, “A little.”

“You think I’m dramatizing?”

“That’s natural.”

“But you think it’s a mistake,” she said, with the laughter under control. “You think feeling guilty is just an indulgence?”

“What I think is—,” he said. “I think that this is minor. Things will happen in your life—things will probably happen in your life—that will make this seem minor. Other things you’ll be able to feel guilty about.”

“Don’t people always say that, though? To somebody who is younger? They say, oh, you won’t think like this someday. You wait and see. As if you didn’t have a right to any serious feelings. As if you weren’t capable.”

“Feelings,” he said. “I was talking about experience.”

“But you are sort of saying that guilt isn’t any use. People do say that. Is it true?”

“You tell me.”

They went on talking about this for a considerable time, in low voices, but so forcefully that people passing by sometimes looked astonished, or even offended, as people may when they overhear debates that seem unnecessarily abstract. Juliet realized, after a while, that though she was arguing—rather well,
she thought—for the necessity of some feelings of guilt both in public and in private life, she had stopped feeling any, for the moment. You might even have said that she was enjoying herself.

He suggested that they go forward to the lounge, where they could drink coffee. Once there Juliet discovered that she was quite hungry, though the lunch hours were long over. Pretzels and peanuts were all that could be procured, and she gobbled them up in such a way that the thoughtful, slightly competitive conversation they were having before was not retrievable. So they talked instead about themselves. His name was Eric Porteous, and he lived in a place called Whale Bay, somewhere north of Vancouver, on the west coast. But he was not going there immediately, he was breaking the trip in Regina, to see some people he had not seen for a long time. He was a fisherman, he caught prawns. She asked about the medical experience he had referred to, and he said, “Oh, it’s not very extensive. I did some medical study. When you’re out in the bush or on the boat anything can happen. To the people you’re working with. Or to yourself.”

He was married, his wife’s name was Ann.

Eight years ago, he said, Ann had been injured in a car accident. For several weeks she was in a coma. She came out of that, but she was still paralyzed, unable to walk or even to feed herself. She seemed to know who he was, and who the woman who looked after her was—with the help of this woman he was able to keep her at home—but her attempts to talk, and to understand what was going on around her, soon faded away.

They had been to a party. She hadn’t particularly wanted to go but he had wanted to go. Then she decided to walk home by herself, not being very happy with things at the party.

It was a gang of drunks from another party who ran off the road and knocked her down. Teenagers.

Luckily, he and Ann had no children. Yes, luckily.

“You tell people about it and they feel they have to say, how terrible. What a tragedy. Et cetera.”

“Can you blame them?” said Juliet, who had been about to say something of the sort herself.

No, he said. But it was just that the whole thing was a lot more complicated than that. Did Ann feel that it was a tragedy? Probably not. Did he? It was something you got used to, it was a new kind of life. That was all.

All of Juliet’s enjoyable experience of men had been in fantasy. One or two movie stars, the lovely tenor—not the virile heartless hero—on a certain old recording of
Don Giovanni
. Henry V, as she read about him in Shakespeare and as Laurence Olivier had played him in the movie.

This was ridiculous, pathetic, but who ever needed to know? In actual life there had been humiliation and disappointment, which she had tried to push out of her mind as quickly as possible.

There was the experience of being stranded head and shoulders above the gaggle of other unwanted girls at the high school dances, and being bored but making a rash attempt to be lively on college dates with boys she didn’t much like, who did not much like her. Going out with the visiting nephew of her thesis adviser last year and being broken into—you couldn’t call it rape, she too was determined—late at night on the ground in Willis Park.

On the way home he had explained that she wasn’t his type. And she had felt too humiliated to retort—or even to be aware, at that moment—that he was not hers.

She had never had fantasies about a particular, real man—least
of all about any of her teachers. Older men—in real life—seemed to her to be slightly unsavory.

This man was how old? He had been married for at least eight years—and perhaps two years, two or three years, more than that. Which made him probably thirty-five or thirty-six. His hair was dark and curly with some gray at the sides, his forehead wide and weathered, his shoulders strong and a little stooped. He was hardly any taller than she was. His eyes were wide set, dark, and eager but also wary. His chin was rounded, dimpled, pugnacious.

She told him about her job, the name of the school—Torrance House. (“What do you want to bet it’s called Torments?”) She told him that she was not a real teacher but that they were glad to get anybody who had majored in Greek and Latin at college. Hardly anybody did anymore.

“So why did you?”

“Oh, just to be different, I guess.”

Then she told him what she had always known that she should never tell any man or boy, lest he lose interest immediately.

“And because I love it. I love all that stuff. I really do.”

They ate dinner together—each drinking a glass of wine—and then went up to the observation car, where they sat in the dark, all by themselves. Juliet had brought her sweater this time.

“People must think there’s nothing to see up here at night,” he said. “But look at the stars you can see on a clear night.”

Indeed the night was clear. There was no moon—at least not yet—and the stars appeared in dense thickets, both faint and bright. And like anyone who had lived and worked on boats, he was familiar with the map of the sky. She was able to locate only the Big Dipper.

“That’s your start,” he said. “Take the two stars on the side
of the Dipper opposite the handle. Got them? Those are the pointers. Follow them up. Follow them, you’ll find the polestar.” And so on.

He found for her Orion, which he said was the major constellation in the Northern Hemisphere in winter. And Sirius, the Dog Star, at that time of year the brightest star in the whole northern sky.

Juliet was pleased to be instructed but also pleased when it came her turn to be the instructor. He knew the names but not the history.

She told him that Orion was blinded by Enopion but had got his sight back by looking at the sun.

“He was blinded because he was so beautiful, but Hephaestus came to his rescue. Then he was killed anyway, by Artemis, but he got changed into a constellation. It often happened when somebody really valuable got into bad trouble, they were changed into a constellation. Where is Cassiopeia?”

He directed her to a not very obvious W.

“It’s supposed to be a woman sitting down.”

“That was on account of beauty too,” she said.

“Beauty was dangerous?”

“You bet. She was married to the king of Ethiopia and she was the mother of Andromeda. And she bragged about her beauty and for punishment she was banished to the sky. Isn’t there an Andromeda, too?”

“That’s a galaxy. You should be able to see it tonight. It’s the most distant thing you can see with the naked eye.”

Even when guiding her, telling her where to look in the sky, he never touched her. Of course not. He was married.

“Who was Andromeda?” he asked her.

“She was chained to a rock but Perseus rescued her.”

Whale Bay.

A long dock, a number of large boats, a gas station and store that has a sign in the window saying that it is also the bus stop and the Post Office.

A car parked at the side of this store has in its window a homemade taxi sign. She stands just where she stepped down from the bus. The bus pulls away. The taxi toots its horn. The driver gets out and comes towards her.

“All by yourself,” he says. “Where are you headed for?”

She asks if there is a place where tourists stay. Obviously there won’t be a hotel.

“I don’t know if there’s anybody renting rooms out this year. I could ask them inside. You don’t know anybody around here?”

Nothing to do but to say Eric’s name.

“Oh sure,” he says with relief. “Hop in, we’ll get you there in no time. But it’s too bad, you pretty well missed the wake.”

At first she thinks that he said
wait
. Or
weight?
She thinks of fishing competitions.

“Sad time,” the driver says, now getting in behind the wheel. “Still, she wasn’t ever going to get any better.”

Wake
. The wife. Ann.

“Never mind,” he says. “I expect there’ll still be some people hanging around. Of course you did miss the funeral. Yesterday. It was a monster. Couldn’t get away?”

Juliet says, “No.”

“I shouldn’t be calling it a wake, should I? Wake is what you have before they’re buried, isn’t it? I don’t know what you call what takes place after. You wouldn’t want to call it a party, would you? I can just run you up and show you all the flowers and tributes, okay?”

Inland, off the highway, after a quarter of a mile or so of rough dirt road, is Whale Bay Union Cemetery. And close to
the fence is the mound of earth altogether buried in flowers. Faded real flowers, bright artificial flowers, a little wooden cross with the name and date. Tinselly curled ribbons that have blown about all over the cemetery grass. He draws her attention to all the ruts, the mess the wheels of so many cars made yesterday.

“Half of them had never even seen her. But they knew him, so they wanted to come anyway. Everybody knows Eric.”

They turn around, drive back, but not all the way back to the highway. She wants to tell the driver that she has changed her mind, she does not want to visit anybody, she wants to wait at the store to catch the bus going the other way. She can say that she really did get the day wrong, and now she is so ashamed of having missed the funeral that she does not want to show up at all.