The Romantic (2 page)

Perfect for a boy, yes. For a girl, I count on her wanting somebody small and wispy, Abel’s physical opposite. Otherwise, I imagine her wanting Abel and the girl to be alike, and there, too, I am ideal, since he and I have a lot in common. We both collect stones, we are only children, neither of us has any friends. I wish Mrs. Richter would walk past the school one day, during recess, and then she’d find out that Abel isn’t the only one who migrates to the fringes of the yard and shakes the chain-link fence like a convict.

I am in grade five and he’s in grade four, so I see him outside of class, at recess, going to and from school. Sometimes
I spot him in the ravine where, aside from collecting stones, I search for the Indian artifacts that a camp counsellor named Big Bear said could be found by the eagle-eyed and pure of heart. (In the summer months a children’s day camp, Camp Wanawingo, establishes itself at the south end of the ravine across the river from the sludge factory, and the year that my mother disappears I spend two rainy weeks there pretending to be an Indian, that is to say, gathering twigs for the sputtering campfire and weeding a mostly dead vegetable garden planted by the campers from the first session.)

Abel snatches stones up fast, on the move. The steep wooded hillsides I can climb only if I grip roots and branches, he races up and down like an Indian, or as I have been led by Big Bear to believe Indians race: with stealth, scanning to the left and right. I wave at him, sometimes call “Hi!” In the ravine I have the courage to try to establish contact. He glances at me with the same alert indifference he confers on a squirrel. If he is nothing to me but a potential go-between, I am even less to him. I am that human over there. Skinny, female, no threat.

But one day, a Sunday afternoon in May, he approaches within a few yards of where I’m digging for artifacts down by the river.

“Hi,” he murmurs. His eyes are on a pile of stones behind me, near the shore.

“Hi,” I say, coming to my feet. “You’re Abel Richter, aren’t you.”

He nods.

“I live on your street.”

Another nod. The stones are what interest him. He
begins turning over certain ones, replacing each exactly as it was.

“What are you looking for?”

He keeps turning over stones, and then he finds something that he lifts so delicately I think it must be an artifact.

But it’s only a toad. He holds it out to me. I step back.

“It won’t hurt you,” he says. He has a soft, oddly husky voice. An orphan’s voice, I conclude, obscurely envisioning the beatings and damp living quarters that must have produced it. “I’ll show you something,” he says.

The toad’s eyes are closed. In the palm of his hand it sits perfectly still except for the pulsing of its throat. “What?” I say finally.

“Just wait.”

I can’t bear to keep looking at it, so I look at Abel’s forearm, which is slightly sunburned. I imagine Mrs. Richter examining his arms at the orphanage, and despite the ordeal he is forcing upon me, I have a pang of tenderness for him, as if in her stead.

“Come on,” he says, giving the toad a little shake. Its eyes fall open. They shine gold, like sequins.

I am rudely startled. That something so glamorous could be contained in something so loathsome offends both my sense of fair play and my nervous grasp of cause and effect.

“Pretty spectacular,” he says,“don’t you think?”

Spectacular.
A grown-up word. I remember what’s at stake (my getting to meet his mother) and take hold of myself and say,“Is it ever.”

He puts the toad back in its cavity and replaces the stone. “It’s like a Martian toad,” he says, straightening.

We look at each other.

His eyes, gold themselves but darker, the colour of maple syrup, hold nothing I perceive as cunning or sophistication, and yet I have a sense of being appraised by an intelligence superior to my own. A Martian intelligence. I look at the freckles on his nose, the dimple in his chin, his beautiful hair. I have a doll with hair like that … that heap of dark brown curls. His lips are plump and chapped. When he starts chewing the lower one I realize I’m staring and I shift my gaze to the patch on the knee of his blue jeans. “
She
sewed that,” I think mournfully. I think of how Mrs. Richter toils away: mending his jeans, cooking from scratch (or so I imagine), hanging her laundry on the line instead of using an automatic dryer, draping her carpet over the porch wall and beating it with a broom, beating it again after her dog pulls it by the fringe onto the driveway.

Remembering that dog, I say,“You have a dalmatian, don’t you?” my idea being to say that I love dalmatians and ask to see his.

“A dalmatian-hound cross,” he says.

“Oh.” I’m thrown off course. “Well, I love dalmatians.”

“It’s more hound than dalmatian.”

“What’s its name?”

“Cane. Short for Canine.”

“I never heard that name before.”

“Dogs are canines. Like people are humans.”

“Like birds are a flock?”

He looks up as a crow comes flapping low over avians.”

“We had a budgie once.”

It’s true, we did, but I’d almost forgotten. It had a lime-green body and a lemon-yellow head. When my mother gripped it in one hand so that she could trim its claws, it opened and closed its beak without making a sound.

“We called it Bird,” I say, as if this were in the same clever league as Canine. All it was, though, was that my mother never got around to settling on a name.

“Well,” Abel says, still looking up. “I’d better get going.”

“It died mysteriously,” I say.

But he is already moving away.

After only two weeks, it died. After plucking out all its feathers, a few of which I kept for years in a pink plastic purse.

Abel died on my twenty-sixth birthday. Drank himself to death, everyone says, and so do I sometimes, it’s just simpler. People know what you’re telling them: he killed himself but he did it slowly and indirectly, maybe even unintentionally. They understand that there’s probably a lot more to the story than you want to get into.

From the first crisis until the end took a little over a year, and during that time I saw him almost every morning, dropping by his apartment on my way to work. Usually he was still in bed, but he’d get up and I’d light him a cigarette while he stood swaying in his navy-and-white-striped pyjamas that made him look like a prisoner of war. They were clean, though, no buttons missing, a tear at the shoulder neatly repaired by his own hands, which, as he took the cigarette, trembled so badly I had to steer it toward his mouth.

I couldn’t watch him smoke. I’d wander around and be heart-stricken by the vacuum-cleaner tracks in the carpet, the emptied-out ashtrays. He’d always been fastidious but this was different, this was him not wanting us—his parents and me—to worry any more than we already were.

He was so frail, so thin. Not gaunt, just sharper boned, his face suddenly sculpted, as if offering a preview of the handsome older man he would never become.

Why couldn’t I save him? And if I couldn’t, why couldn’t
Bach or astronomy, why couldn’t trees? “I’m not important,” he’d say, and it didn’t help, my saying that he was, or,“All right,
I’m
important, what about me?” He’d give me a look that made me feel as though I were begging him not to run off with another woman. He loved me, he pitied me, I could see he did, but there was a wash of absence over him like nostalgia for a future he was already living in.

A hot windy night in late June of 1968 and I am on my way to a party where I’ll get pregnant.

Not that I know this or intend it.

My date is Tim Todd, son of Big Ben Todd, who used to drink all the rye at my parents’ annual charades tournament and then invite the other husbands to punch him in the stomach. Since he was their boss, a partner in the law firm, they were all obliged to take a turn. Of course, they pulled their punches, which only made Big Ben more belligerent. “Come on!” he’d bellow. “Put some muscle behind it!”

Tim is small boned and careful, more like his mother. He is my age, seventeen, almost eighteen, but with his drawn face and hollow eyes he could pass for twenty-five. He drives slouched in his seat, brooding. Whenever I’m turned away from him, as I am now (leaning out my opened window to imagine I’m in a convertible), he thinks my mind is on Abel. Usually he’s right. I can ignore his sullen spells. What I dread are the apologies: long, pained speeches, ambiguously tied to the writings of Ayn Rand or General Ulysses S. Grant, about why, in fact, he actually respects my attachment to a boy I haven’t seen or heard from in years. It drives me crazy.

The truth is, very little about him
doesn’t
drive me crazy. I have developed the habit of punching his arm, a persecution
he takes unflinchingly, in the tradition of his father. When we arrive at the party and he rings the bell, I go to punch him just as he turns toward me, and somehow I end up socking him in the jaw.

“Oh, sorry,” I say. “Are you okay?”

“What was that for?”

“The door’s open. We’re supposed to go right in.”

Poor Tim Todd with his nursery-rhyme name and bad-tempered date. He is wondering what the two of us are doing here when we could be playing backgammon in the light of his tropical fish tanks. He’s aggressively unsocial, but then so am I, or was, until yesterday on the Victoria Park bus when I sat beside a spectacularly beautiful girl who was inviting everybody around her, including the driver, to a party at her house in one of the wealthiest sections of the city. “Bring some cool guys,” she said, addressing me specifically.

By which I knew she meant guys with long hair. Not Tim Todd, in other words, but as I thought I’d have nobody to talk to, I dragged him along.

I wish I hadn’t. “Mafia money,” he says when we enter the white marble foyer. He’s still rubbing his jaw. When we enter the crowded living room and I say,“I wonder where Gena is,” he snorts and says,“Not greeting her guests at the door.”

The music, Grace Slick singing “White Rabbit,” blows in from somewhere else, another room or from outside. “Oh,” I say,“I love this song.”

“Since when?” Tim says.

“Since right now.” I start swaying to the beat.

“It’s like an oven in here,” he mutters. He lifts his chin and sniffs. “Is that marijuana?”

“I don’t smell anything.”

“I think it is,” he says tightly. “I think it’s marijuana.”

“So what?”

He blinks at me, surprised.

“Why don’t you get something to drink,” I say.

“I’m not thirsty.”

“Well, then go look around.” I start squeezing through the group of people in front of us. “Try and find the aquarium.”

“They have an
aquarium?”

“Rich people always have aquariums.” I give him a wave. “See you later.”

I make for the marijuana smokers, a circle of them passing each other a pipe the size of a clarinet. One of the smokers (it’s hard to tell from the back if it’s a girl or guy) has hair like an explosion, bursting out in coils. The guy relighting the pipe wears a Che Guevara bandanna. A rush of desire goes through me, not just for him, for all of them, they’re so shocking and nonchalant. I stand closer and inhale the smoke drifting my way. Maybe in a little while I’ll work up the nerve to join the circle. I’m in a strange, reckless mood tonight. I have a tremendous feeling of anticipation. A girl cradling purple lilac blossoms taps me on the shoulder, and because she looks at me in a haunted, searching way, I think she has something important to tell me,
me
personally. But she only hands me a blossom and strolls off.

I bring the blossom to my nose. It smells like mystery, glamour. I glance back at Tim, who is standing with three
other short-haired guys and cocking his head at an earnest listening angle. I turn before he can catch my eye. Holding the lilac like a cigarette, I walk toward a pair of open French doors and through them onto a veranda.

The music has switched to something bluesy featuring a flute, and down on the lawn about twenty people, Gena among them, do solitary dances around a fountain in which naked female statues pour water from jugs. The water shoots sideways into sashes, I can feel the spray all the way to where I’m standing. I go to the railing, and there is the whole golf-course-sized lawn, perfectly round bushes ranged across it like planets, causeways of white lights streaming overhead from the eaves of the house all the way to the aristocratic old willows that thrash at the back of the property. In order to get down the stairs I have to step over the legs of girls sprawled against boys and wearing dresses so short you can see their underpants in the veranda lights. They’re friendly, these girls. “Sorry,” they say, shifting sideways. “Can you get by?”

I go to the fountain and sit on the edge. Gena’s dance is more like the dance of her long hair, which is really remarkable, jet black and sleek, like tar. While she slowly sways, it whips around in the wind. At one point she opens her eyes and looks in my direction and I lift a hand but I don’t think she notices. I get up then, and make my way along the edge of the property. When I reach the willows I see water farther along, behind a stone wall, so I keep going. A gate is in the wall, and I pass through it and walk over to a wooden bench that is next to a wrought-iron replica of an old streetlamp. I sit and kick off my shoes. You can feel the coolness of the
water gusting off the pond. There are water-lily buds like candle flames. Ducks, stationary as decoys, rock on the waves.

But they’re not ducks, as I realize after a moment. They’re geese. And the pond … the pond is a wide place in a creek.

“Nothing is what it seems,” I think. I find this to be a deeply exciting idea. I sense a faint flash of light to my left, and I hold my breath, wondering if it’s angels. For as long as I can remember I’ve been prone to seeing scarves of white light out of the corners of my eyes, especially when I’m keyed up, and I call them angels because the air around me seems to get somehow purer and emptier, a really spooky feeling. I have this feeling now. I turn.