Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (32 page)

Was this another occasion?

“This one Douglas helped me put in last week,” said Ewart, displaying to her a low bristly shrub. He used his son's name exactly as June did, casually yet emphatically. Natural, unacknowledged delicacy and hesitancy made his emphasis less troubling than hers. He went on to talk about Japanese gardens. He told her that, at one time, in Japan, precise regulations had been laid down concerning the height of steppingstones. For the Emperor they were six inches high, and so on down to common folk and women who walked on stones of an inch and a half. He was putting in water.

“The sound of water in the Japanese garden is quite as important as the sight of it. It's going to fall over here, you see. It will be like a miniature waterfall, bisected by this rock. Everything is to scale. That's how you get the extraordinary effect. If you look at it and you're not looking at anything else—well, after a while it begins to seem like a real waterfall, a real landscape.”

He talked about the arrangements for bringing in this water, the system of underground pipes. He had always such detailed, minute knowledge about his current projects, such firm enthusiasm. He always seemed to know more than even somebody who had made such things his life's work would need to know. Perhaps it was because he himself did not really have a life's work, he did not need to earn his living.

An occasion, why not? An occasion to display, to air, to test those values that we live by. Ewart and June did live
by values, they would tell you so.
Why not?
thought Eileen, listening to the discourse on pipes, and, when that was exhausted, to a discourse on shrubs. She preferred, did she, to see the fact of a death set up whole and unavoidable, in front of everybody's eyes? Without religion, that could not be done. That is, it could not be done. And suppose her daughter, suppose Margot? She had thought of that at once, as soon as she heard, relief and terror peculiarly alternating. It was as if Douglas, by attracting lightning, had given everyone else's child a breath of safety, at the same time reminding that lightning was there. Margot, who might at any moment be getting into a leaky boat, an about-to-be-hijacked plane, a bus with faulty brakes, might be entering a building where bombs had been set by terrorists, Margot ran more risk than Douglas living at home. And yet.

He had been killed in a car accident. The three other boys with him had not been much hurt.

A chunky boy. On the plane, Eileen had tried to get a clear picture of him. His fair hair was worn long, held with a band at the back of his neck, like his mother's. But he did not share the preoccupations of the long-haired of his own generation. Altered states of consciousness, transcendental perceptions, were no concern of his. He attached himself stubbornly to temporal, material, scientific interests, to moon-flights, sports (as a spectator), and even to the stock market. He was like his father in his dogged, perhaps passionate, amassing and treasuring and reciting of detail. He enjoyed explaining. He had few friends. He walked around the house with a reserved and dictatorial air, drinking diet Coke. Ewart and June had always filled the weekends, the holidays, with family activities. They owned a sailboat. They went mountain-climbing and cave-exploring. They skied and skated and recently they had bought ten-speed bicycles. Eileen supposed that Douglas took part in all this, he could hardly avoid it; but his stodgy figure, his sedentary style, raised doubts as to how heartfelt, how thoroughgoing, such
participation might be. He had gone to the experimental school which depended so largely on his parents' financial support. The freedom insisted on there, the efforts on behalf of creativity, might not have been congenial to him. Eileen could only suspect. Douglas himself would not have indicated. He was not, he had not been, romantic enough to see himself as the rebel, the skeptic, in this orthodoxy.

His father squatted down to touch the shrubs, showing her the different kinds of needles, speaking of their complicated requirements, of soil analysis, water, nourishment. He gave his attention. He was not a sexually attractive man. Why not? His large sad butt, his vulnerable priggish look from the rear? Once June had told Eileen that she and Ewart had gone to some pornographic movies, with other couples from what was called a Growth Group, in the Unitarian Church. They were interested in exploring new stimuli. Eileen had told this to people, about her sister, she had made an example and a joke about it. Now she thought that her laughter had been beside the point. Not because it was unkind, as she had guiltily thought at the time, but because it was uncomprehending. This earnestness was no joke. Here was a system of digestion which found everything to its purposes. It stuck at nothing. Japanese gardens, pornographic movies, accidental death. All of them accepted, chewed and altered, assimilated, destroyed.

After the Memorial Service the house was full of June's and Ewart's friends and neighbors and the friends of their teenaged children. The teenagers were downstairs in the recreation room, in front of the floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace. Many of them claimed to be friends of Douglas. Perhaps they were. They came with guitars, recorders, candles. One girl came wrapped in a quilt. “Is this where they're having the Memorial Party?” she asked at the door, in her
soft radiance. Others wore fringed shawls, flimsy trailing dresses. They looked not so different from their elders as they might have wished. Downstairs they lit the candles; they had only that light, and the fire. They burned incense. They sang and played their instruments. The incense odor, rising, had an edge of marijuana.

“Their way of saying good-bye to Douglas,” said a long-haired, ravaged-looking woman, also shawl-wrapped, leaning over the bannister. “It's very lovely, really, it's very moving.”

But would Douglas have cared for it, for the Memorial Party? He would not have said. He would have stayed with it a while, anyway, out of politeness; then he might have gone to his room with the market section of the paper.

“They've got a joint or two down there, smells like,” said a man coming up behind this woman, and Eileen knew from the way the woman did not answer, from the closing of her face and her whole self, that it must be her husband. Unlike his wife, he had come conservatively dressed, he looked as men used to look at funerals. Such couples were common nowadays—husband responsible, respectable, vulnerable, only slightly longer hair and timid sideburns, tie and clean cuffs, a faintly apologetic or ridiculous air of real, though deplorable, money and power; wife careless, make-up-less, anything but matronly, trailing the garments of exotic poverty. Occasionally there was a couple who were the mirror-opposite of these—wife coifed and pastel-suited and button-earringed, husband in an embroidered velvet vest, amulets and crosses twinkling among the hairs of his chest.

This husband and Eileen moved into the living room, which was full of just such people. Shawls and caftans, printed cotton from India, jeans, expensive tailoring. It would not have been difficult, even two or three years ago, to tell the rich friends of Ewart and June, their neighbors, from the Unitarians, the Growth Group friends. Now it was impossible. Some of these people were probably both.

Ewart moved among them offering drinks. June was in the dining room, beside the table with the coffee and sandwiches. Sausage rolls, asparagus rolls. She had found some time to make those. Her clothing was lovely—a long hand-woven orange and gold dress and matching stole, thick and rough, Mexican or Spanish. Her silver-green eyelids were a surprise and a mistake, the only hint of something hectic, unsure.

“Are you all right?” she said to her sister. “I haven't been able to take you round and introduce you to people, I'm just letting you fend for yourself.”

“I'm all right,” Eileen said. “I'm drinking.”

She had given up asking what she could do to help. She had given up looking for things to do. The kitchen, the dining room, were full of women who knew where everything was kept, but they had hardly any more luck than she. June had forestalled all of them. Everything was thought of, everything was done.

The walls, the high, sloping ceiling of the living room were of warm wood; the carpet and the curtains were heavy, creamy, soft. Eileen drank vodka. The curtains were not drawn shut, and she saw them all in their splendid, confusing costumes (herself too, betraying her own sterner judgments, in a dark blue caftan embroidered with silver threads), moving, drinking, talking, against the late afternoon, the early evening. Against the rainy dark she saw them all so bright and sheltered. She saw the carpet of lights which was the city, the strip of blackness which was the water.

“Do you know where you are?” the husband said to her. “You're up on the side of Hollyburn mountain. That's Point Grey over there.” He made her move closer to the window so that he could point out in the opposite direction the Lions Gate Bridge, a distant tiara of moving lights.

“Stupendous view,” he said.

Eileen agreed.

He was a neighbor, he told her, he had built a house
a little further up the mountain. Like many rich people he seemed to be full of a sincere and puzzled, almost heavy-hearted, hope that he had got what he should.

“We used to have a house in North Van,” he said. “And I wasn't sure for a long time we were right to give it up. I wasn't sure I would like this view as much. We used to look out and see the slope of this mountain, right where we are now, and the bridge and the city, and on a clear day we could see Vancouver Island. Looking westerly you get the sunsets. Magnificent. But now I'm just as much in love with this, too, I wouldn't ever want to go back.”

“Do you always like views?” said Eileen.

“Always like views?” he repeated, and showed by his bent head, his tolerant eyebrows, that he was waiting to be charmed.

“Well suppose you're in a low mood, you know, you might be feeling in a very low mood and you get up and here spread out before you is this magnificent view. All the time, you can't get away from it. Don't you ever feel not up to it?”

“Not up to it?”

“Guilty,” said Eileen, persistently though regretfully. “That you're not in a better mood? That you're not more—worthy, of this beautiful view?” She took a large drink, wishing of course that she had never started any of this.

“But as soon as I see the beautiful view,” said the man triumphantly, “then I couldn't be in a low mood any more. That view does more for me than a couple of drinks. More than the stuff they've got downstairs. Besides, I don't believe in being in a low mood. Life's too short.”

Saying this reminded him that they were not at a party, after all.

“Life's too short. There's no rhyme or reason to the things that happen. Is there? Your sister's magnificent. Ewart too.”

Eileen went down the hall to the guest room, carrying
a fresh strong drink. She passed the door of the room where the small children were playing. The children of friends, playing with June's small adopted daughters. They were playing Fish. She stood and watched them. She felt intimidated somehow by the Indian children, she felt on trial before them. Of course that was when June was there; she could feel June listening, watching—quivering, it seemed, with her keenness to detect failures of attitude. Who would believe now that June, as well as Eileen, had gone around the house talking a singsong pidgin English based on the speech of the Chinese couple at the Becker Street Groceteria? Eileen watched the smooth brown faces of the Indian children. What were they—June's badges, her trophies? She could not see them, only June.

She closed the door of the guest room, she lay in the dark. Crossing her ankles, pushing the pillow up behind her head, still holding the glass but letting it rest on her stomach. She had come to the point she always came to in June's house. Douglas made no difference, death made no difference. She was becoming paralyzed, she could not hold her own. From this house her life, her choices (if indeed there were any), she herself, did not make a favorable or even coherent impression. It had to be admitted that she lived haphazardly, she had wasted too much time, she did few things well. Never mind how all this looked when she was away from here, how she made it into funny stories for friends. Moreover, she had not been able to help.

On the plane she had thought that she would make tea biscuits. As if that would be possible, in June's kitchen.

The news that their father was dead, in the War, had come for some reason in a phone call, at ten or eleven o'clock at night. Their mother had made tea biscuits and tea, and got Eileen up to share them. Not June, she was too little. They had jam. Eileen was greedy but apprehensive. Their mother who was most of the time a dangerous person, full of mysterious hurts, unnameable grievances, seemed to have
abandoned her usual position, to have turned neutral, undemanding, and, of all things,
shy
. She did not tell her news. (She would wake them in the morning with a long white face, an unwelcome kiss, a prepared voice.
Daddy is dead
.) Years later Eileen had tried to talk to June about this vigil with the biscuits, the revelation of their mother as someone frail and still; almost, almost—the thing they most hoped for then—an ordinary woman. June said she had worked through all that.