The Middle Stories (9 page)
Read The Middle Stories Online
Authors: Sheila Heti
Ten minutes passed, then another five, and neither of them spoke. Their thoughts were hazy, somewhat around their loneliness and ugliness, and finally Marianne said, “Whatever you want,” and they got up and started to walk down the boardwalk, on which no one else was walking, and Marianne said, “Where are all the people?”
Todd said, “At home, in front of their fireplaces, wine in hand, love by their side, all warm and happy and beautiful, like you know.”
And Marianne said, “Why are we the only ones here?”
And Todd said, “There’s nowhere else for us to go.”
Later, Marianne sighed, and Todd asked, “Are you crying?”
And Marianne said, “No.”
“Todd,” said Marianne, “are we ever going to get married and have children?”
And Todd said, “I don’t think so.”
And they both felt something.
“Todd,” said Marianne, “I love you. I really do.”
And Todd said, “You’re a silly girl, but I love you too.”
They didn’t take each other’s hand. They sat down on a bench and looked out over the water and heard not the rustle of people or the roar of traffic or the raindrops on the lake. They didn’t hear each other breathing, or feel the presence of God. They heard their heavy thoughts and slumped back on the bench and contemplated some. Well, if it wasn’t the sea, so dark and grim. If it wasn’t the sky, the worst of the year. If it wasn’t the weather, the coldest day yet. And everyone inside escaping it. And there they were, ugly and forlorn, in a day just as ugly, and just as forlorn, but still a day, still a day.
THE POET AND THE NOVELIST AS ROOMMATES
THE POET WENT softly to the novelist’s bedroom, while the novelist lay asleep, sleep coming out heavy like a stink through his nose. The poet stood in the doorway, watching, pressing down on the doorframe.
He loved his roommate. But not like that. It was four in the morning and why had he woken? Sleep was a burden for a man like him. And yet here was a man who slept through the night.
“He must be in a state of guilt,” the poet thought, before turning and going to bed. Padding through the hall he asked himself quietly, “What am I doing in this city? Even looking at the clouds I feel I have lost my imagination.”
ON THE WOMAN’S first day at work the poet helped her with her boxes, but as he was helping he was looking away.
“Do you know this is my seventieth sick day since I started here?” he asked.
“But you’re here,” she said.
“Yes, I know.” And he went to the bathroom and peed blood.
When he returned she was sitting upright, typing at her computer like a good girl. There was a calculated grace about her and it was this that caused him, eyes drooping and weary, to lean over the partition and say to her face, “Come with me after work. I will show you a good place to drink around here.”
“I’ll come, sure,” she said, looking up, and there was no guile expressed, just a big round smile and those hateful eyes that only women understood.
When the workday ended he took her by the arm and led her to The Poodle, which was seedy and disreputable and no place for a woman in a cubicle to be. He looked around. She was wearing a bra on tight beneath her clothing.
“Sit down here at this booth,” he said, pushing in her body with both his hands, “and I will get you a soda water.”
“I take gin in my soda water,” she said hopefully, and the poet walked away with a shudder. These modern women. They had no sense of their own indecency.
When he returned with the drinks he slipped into the booth and began to twitch in boredom as he listened to her story.
“I have a husband and three children,” she began.
“But you look eighteen,” he said mournfully, and swished his drink. A husband and three children. “You should not be dressed like that then,” he concluded.
She furrowed her brow and sucked up her drink with pristine fury. “Thank you for this,” she said, smacking down the glass and dropping the straw from her lips as she walked.
When he returned that night he found his roommate working on his novel. Looking up from the computer his roommate beckoned him over.
“I think there is a bug behind the glass,” said the novelist, pointing to a place on the screen, then tracing it, following it.
“I don’t see it,” the poet replied, eyes crossed in intoxication.
“Go to bed,” the novelist said, and the poet did.
WHEN THE POET woke he remembered the woman, the one with the husband and the three lovely kids. Probably right now she was frantically diapering them, or shoving sandwiches into their boxes, not thinking anything, just scurrying around with a phone in her chin, talking to her sister in Ottawa.
“It has been so in politics, it has been so in religion, and it has been so in every other department of human thought,” he thought, and got up and undressed and went to the shower and rubbed himself hard, then went to his room where he dressed in brown and walked in the rain to work.
When he arrived the woman in the cubicle was already there. Her spine was haughty and tense and she was turned away. But as he sat and arranged his folders he knew that she was thinking of him. “She can’t do any better than me,” he determined. Yes, he would destroy her. This woman with the husband and the three lovely kids; she was looking for an affair, a real sweaty romance, he could smell it on her skin.
Indeed, by the coffeemaker at 11 AM she said, “I would like to go home with you tonight. I would like to see where you live.”
“It is not a sight for a lady,” he said, dangling this info in front of her. “It’s a small place. A man’s place. I’m a poet, you see, and I live there alone with my roommate of seven years who is cruel. Women fall in love with him but he cannot love them back. He is a novelist. He’s very messy.”
“I want to come home with you,” the woman said, pressing her eyes into him and spilling all the coffee.
THAT NIGHT THEY sat around the table: the poet, the novelist, and the woman from the cubicle. The woman from the cubicle, eyes all aglow, looked back and forth from one to the other. One was so gruff and silent and thick, like a real man! And the other was disinterested and distracted and edgy, like a real man! She was falling in love with them both.
The novelist, feeling violated for reasons he could not understand, stood up and left the table and went to his computer and peered in, and again saw the bug behind the screen. “Damn it!” he cried, pounding his fist into his desk. The poet looked dreary and did not respond.
The woman said, “Please, tell me about your life. You must be fascinating. I have never known a poet before, except for one in high school. And I don’t even know if he’s still a poet.”
The poet said darkly, “Don’t tell me that.” Then, “Come with me to the bedroom. It is my bedroom and I should like to show it to you.”
The woman put down her fork and followed in behind. She was delighted. She felt so bohemian. She wanted to take off all her clothes.
“Good,” he said, turning on a lamp. “You can see now on my wall two letters from Al Purdy, telling me I am good but not good enough.”
He sat on the bed which was low to the floor and spread apart his legs and looked up at her as she walked around the narrow space, fingering all the things.
“That is a picture taken of me when I was in Poland. I was a professor.”
“You look very Polish here.”
“I know.”
He lay back on his bed and looked up at the ceiling, hands adjusted behind his head. “Do you smoke?” he asked.
“No.”
“Please go into the next room and get a cigarette from my novelist roommate. He should have a pack beside him on the desk. Tell him it is for me; he will understand. If he refuses to give you one or throws a fit, leave the room at once. Sometimes it bothers him to be interrupted while writing.”
The woman left the room and walked down the hall and saw the novelist hunched before his computer, deep in his chair, pressing his fingers to the screen. “Come,” he said, when he heard her approach, and she moved toward his desk and placed her hands upon it and leaned archingly forward. He put one hand on her ass, felt it shifting beneath her dress.
“Do you see a bug?”
She held her breath, did not move. Then she looked evasively away and said, “I have come here to get a cigarette for the poet. He says you’ll understand.”
“Sure I understand.” He somberly pulled two cigarettes from the pack and gave them to her. She left the room and walked numbly through the hall toward the poet, and on the walk she remembered a dream. “I dreamed once I was in a room with other people.”
When the poet saw her he sat upright on the bed. “Close the door,” he said. “The novelist gets very jealous.”
She closed the door and sat down beside him. She put the cigarettes in his hand. He looked at them dumbly. She wanted him to throw his leg across her, push her down on the bed, slap her and rape her hard.
“Two,” he said. “He must like you.”
“Yes. He touched me on my bum.”
“Let me see.”
She lay down on her stomach and he examined her through her dress.
THE SORT OF WOMAN FREEMAN LOVED
FREEMAN TOOK THE woman with the good body and drove and drove in his squat yellow car all the way to a country parish where he married her. Though she seemed at the time to be smiling, if he had looked closely he would have seen a trace of exasperation.
They settled in Manshire, where she told him, on their first day together in their brand-new house, that she was bored already and if he couldn’t provide her with entertainment she’d be forced to run away. Her name was Sally. There were silly little dreams Sally had that she mistook for grand possibilities; this was her central failing.
One Saturday morning in June, after the newlyweds had been living in their dreary little bungalow for three months, a salesman came to their door and introduced himself as Eli. It was his job, he said, to give people the one thing they really needed. After all, he wouldn’t be much of a salesman if he gave people the one thing they really didn’t want. Ha ha. So what was it he could provide them with? He would be happy to open his briefcase on their living room table and show them what a decent honest man he was. See? No gimmicks.
Well, Sally looked at Freeman and Freeman looked at Sally. He shrugged. She told him emphatically that what they needed was someone to entertain her; indeed, she began to describe the man she was thinking of in glorious detail, triple-X detail, leaving out the measurements that didn’t count, like the circumference of his anus. But his eyes had to be icy blue. He ought never to smile and should have big, burly hands that he never—or rarely—used in big, burly ways. His skin would have to be the color of taffy and his lips lighter than his skin. Hair curled just so.
“I can do that,” the salesman said, snapping closed his briefcase. He left their house with a parting wave and a big broad smile, then turned to face the road. Locking the door behind him, the two went to sit on the couch. Sally fantasized about her elaborate dream, part of which involved making it in the role of public celebrity. Freeman smiled into her face. She was beautiful. Whatever, she was the woman he wanted.
Suddenly Sally turned to him. “You
do
know that I love you, Freeman.”
do
know that I love you, Freeman.”
Freeman smiled and nodded. He knew. She had married him and now she was living with him. She was living with him in their very own house.
THE NEXT WEEK the salesman was back at their door with a large wooden crate. It was a Sunday morning and since only religious good could come on a Sunday, the salesman told them that it might be best if they didn’t open the package till midnight. Just out of respect for the Lord; they understood his reasoning. Could he have his money now? The salesman stood there tapping his foot and grimacing at the cloudy sky as Freeman wrote out a check for seven thousand dollars, then softly closed the door.
When he returned to the living room his wife was already pulling nails out of the crate.
“But, but Sally, didn’t you hear the man? He said it was best to leave the day to its religious duty.”
“Shut up, Freeman.”
The crate flung open and standing there before her was the man she had ordered, exact. He was wearing thin black underwear and his arms hung at his sides. His face showed no expression. Sally threw her head back and laughed and hooted in glee. It was the first time Freeman had ever seen her genuinely excited, and he was scared. He escaped into the kitchen and telephoned his mother.
“Sally’s crazy, Mom!” Freeman whispered into the phone, half a mile away from tears.
His mother was a tiny shrugging woman in a little house far away, and her words were coming faint over the line like a whisper on a thread, so that it suddenly occurred to Freeman that she might soon be dead. He hung up the phone and hurried into the living room where Sally was standing gleefully, running her hands up and down the chest of the entertaining man, pressing her body into him, eyes all aglow.
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