The Best Thing for You (29 page)

Oh, you know. He held a hand out, conducting her exit. He’s at that age. Everything embarrasses him, his old parents most of all. He thinks he’s very misunderstood.

He sounds like a dear.

He caught the layer beneath the layer of words. She saw it in the sudden unhappy look he gave her as he said, Sometimes he’s a very sweet boy, just like when he was little. Sometimes he’s a complete stranger. There are moments when I truly believe he hates us. Can you remember being that way, when you were his age?

Can’t you?

Fourteen, the agent said, shaking his head. At fourteen I spent a lot of time outdoors.

He smiled broadly then and she saw he had withdrawn his attention from her, had gone back inside himself like a turtle, though he continued to joke and chat as he showed her out.

In the days that followed she went through her memories like a woman going through a pouch of coins, trying to reckon what exactly she had:

Sitting with him, side by side on her parents’ couch. Shame
made her despise him. When he placed a hand flat on the cushion between them, reaching but not touching, she wanted him dead.

My daughter tells me you’re a journalist, Mr. Pass.

She let nothing show. She had told her father exactly what this boy she’d met did, but he was determined to put everyone in the room in his place. Privately he would call her suitor a mechanic. Overnight he would grow chary of touching her, with a pointedness that said she had changed hands, how did she like that?

Well, not exactly, sir. He shot her a sheepish sideways smile as though realizing she might be dumb after all. Actually –

You might as well know we think Anna’s too young, her father said. Eighteen is too young for what you have in mind, her mother and I agree.

No, no, no, he said. I mean, sir, there’ll be chaperones. My whole family will be there, I don’t guess we’ll have a minute to ourselves all weekend. I have sisters, he said, appealing suddenly to her mother.

Sisters, how nice, her mother said.

Anna doesn’t ski, her father said.

The lodge belonged to Buddy’s uncle, a hearty roguish twenties type with slick hair who called his nephew Bernie and pretended to have a heart attack when he met Anna. She would remember the weekend as a collage of hair and gloves and teeth and coins, for sleigh rides and hot cider, dropped and gone in the snow. Buddy’s sisters were both cheerful plain tomboys with good skis who had brought assorted girlfriends and boyfriends and country cousins, a noisy athletic crowd that treated Anna with a kind of amiable deference, like they would an exotic, expensive cat. They had cast her as the rich city girl, the catch, the juicy Juliet with the pretty muff and the useless boots whose parents almost didn’t let her come. Finally, the friendly little
cousin she shared a room with told her she was Buddy’s first serious girlfriend and they were all keeping their fingers crossed.

Buddy himself grew ruddy in the wintry air, horsing around with snowballs and taking her for walks in the woods. On one such walk he jokingly said, You might as well know I intend to marry you.

You do?

Sure. He scooped up some snow, packed it with excess attention, and popped it at a tree trunk. That all right with you?

She thought of home, her parents’ closed kingdom. She noticed how his mouth stayed open as he concentrated on his aim. It seemed a small enough thing to get used to.

The wedding was a swell affair and a strange procedure. She remembered it in the black and sudden white of exploding flashbulbs. Her white-gloved fingertips on her father’s black-sleeved arm, the brief unchaste kiss, the nagging weight of the second ring, the cracked cake, the honeymoon in a downtown hotel room. Out on the bay the freighters were tipped with bits of lights, and the North Shore mountains were a dark mass against the last light in the sky. To the south were Kitsilano, the beaches, Point Grey. Straight ahead, west, were the islands, studs in the crawling sea. A rich man’s view. His skin smelled of soap and smoke. She wept with the pain, expectedly.

An argument, this one brushed with malice sticky as tar. She had bought some books.

But they’re second-hand, she said.

It was the bulk of them that seemed to aggravate him: ten books. Ten books! Before it was over he had reminded her of his meagre income, his miserable inheritance, his own worrisome health, his troubles over the house – when the lawyers advised
him to sell, his mother had cried. Greedy, he said now. Women were greedy, also stubborn. They didn’t know the value of a dollar. They were sentimental, they formed sentimental attachments to objects, they lacked a sense of fitness and proportion, they spent money like it was toy. She would have to take them back.

Not my books, she said. Oh, Buddy, not my books.

He was firm. He lectured her again, patiently repeating himself. If she did not take them back, he said, he would have no choice but to suspend her allowance. She was irresponsible, like a child, and spendthrift, and sulky. She saw it was his increased responsibilities at work that had given him this new taste for supervision, and determined to shred his new composure.

At least I don’t send my friends to check up on you, she said.

He offered to.

Peretti, they meant, when she was still sick. He had returned one evening when her mother-in-law was at bridge, to tell her her husband would be working late, and to see if she needed anything.

No, thank you, she had said.

May I, he had started. Then, instead: How are you feeling?

Ever so much better, she said. It was true. The fever had broken, leaving her feeling weak and saintly, cool, a little thin at the edges but back on land, certainly.

Have I upset you?

They had been sitting across from each other in the living room. She had not made a move to light the lamps as the day waned, hoping he would take the hint, but darkness had fallen and he had stayed.

No, she said. Her voice seemed loud in the dark. His face wasn’t clear. She said again, more softly, No.

That evening, I meant. In the kitchen.

No.

No, he repeated. Well. He sat forward and she wondered if he was gathering himself to leave, the way a bird gathers itself to launch. He said what she had been thinking: I can’t see your face.

He wasn’t checking up on you, anyway, her husband said. I don’t send people to check up on you. That’s quite a hell of a thing to say.

I suppose it is.

You suppose it is. What’s got into you, anyway? You’re getting damn hard to be around, you know that? You never used to be so, so –

It’s your precious job. I suppose you think –

– anything to do with my job. Such a –

I’m bored, Buddy. I’m going out of my mind.

Such a bitch, frankly.

They stared at each other. Now they were somewhere.

Yes, well, she said. Suppose we do something about that.

Now you’re just being silly, he said, because she was putting her coat on. From upstairs her mother-in-law was calling, Buddy? Buddy, what’s going on?

It was a warm night, with a few white points of stars and shreds of high cloud, and a moon like a thumbprint. She had told him the truth and he had not even shrugged. Out of my mind, that was what she had said. It was the correct phrase. Stepping out of the front door, she felt she had left a small space for a larger one, a place without heat or pressure or constraint, and if she were careful she might remain there for a while, until she had completed certain tasks. Later she might have to come back to the world and to her own small self, but she had a window now.

You’re joking, the butcher’s boy said.

They sat in the café again, mid-morning this time, as passing
automobiles struck flares of light off the saltcellars, tipping the boy’s ears with a lurid translucence. They were the only customers. Behind the counter, the waitress swept. On the high ceiling a pair of fans slowly wheeled, like the lazy noses of planes, their big orbits telescoped down to her hand idly circling a spoon through her coffee. Since the night of her decision she had seemed to live within the gearwheels of a perfect watch.

Now the boy sat across from her, squinting in the strong light. The sun cut a line across their table, cutting her off at the wrist, painting her out with shade. I must be practically nothing to him, she thought: a dim nearness, a voice only. She stayed back in it.

I couldn’t do that, he said.

Well, you don’t expect me to, do you?

She had him on the rack. He was trembling again, thoughts written on his skin like a girl’s.

Look at you blush, she said.

Don’t you – doesn’t your husband –

His fingers fidgeted with the detritus on the table between them, a napkin, a sugar sachet. They could not keep coming to this same café, she decided. The risk was too great. Peripherally she sensed the waitress and for a moment felt a pulling tiredness, the eyes-closed colourlessness of despair. There were too many details to keep in balance, too many pins and cogs. One slip would jam the whole mechanism, flip her life to farce, or worse. The boy, too, she saw, was hesitating. He thought himself the hero of a grand passion, had not realized until a moment ago that there could be humiliation in success as well as in failure. She would have to work him for a while, like a dough.

I wouldn’t ask you if I could do it myself. If there were another way.

I’m too young.

Are you, suddenly?

The look he planted on her then.

It’s easy, she murmured. You go into the drugstore. If there’s a lady in there you buy a paper and go to another drugstore. When you find a good one you just go up to the man and ask. You say, I want –

The sachet tore in his fingers, sending a spray of sweetness across the table between them.

I want –

He reached across the table to cover her mouth with his hand. She pushed it away. Will you? she said.

He nodded.

Like an artist, she saw the prettier ways it might have been done. I can’t eat, she might have said, I can’t sleep, do you know how thoughts of you distract me? She might have seized his wrist, just now, and suckled the sugar from his fingers. But these were the cheap possibilities, the gaudy strips of celluloid to leave on the cutting room floor. Her style was colder. She was here at all because of that cold empty place. True, she might not have lied, might simply have taken what she needed from the cheerful mess in Buddy’s bathroom drawer (he was constantly losing count, running out, constantly), but she needed the boy to see that he was capable of doing things for her, things he never expected of himself, things that might at first have seemed impossible.

The waitress was not the same one as the first time, but that was just luck.

I don’t like this café, she said. Let’s not come here any more.