The Romantic (31 page)

One day I find that I have also reached the stage where I can bring myself to ask why he never said he loved me. Why he could never say the words.

“I said them,” he whispers.

“Once. You said, ‘I love you too much,’ as if it were a curse.”

“You always knew how I felt.”

“I thought I knew when you were with me. But when we weren’t together, I had no way of knowing how you felt.”

“The same.”

“You can’t even say it now. You can’t say, ‘I love you, Louise.’”

“I love you, Louise.”

“In a court of law you could claim that you were merely
repeating what I’d just said, merely considering the idea.”

“I love you, Louise.”

It’s Saturday, late morning. He’s still in bed (though he assures me he’ll get up soon,“everything’s fine”) so I have taken off my clothes and gotten under the blanket to lie with him. “Have you lost your voice?” I ask. He won’t answer directly; he says,“I feel like whispering today.” His breath is sweet. Maybe he has switched to drinking liqueurs, or maybe it’s because his lips have stopped bleeding. His face is nearly translucent; you can see the finer veins as if, at this late date, what was hidden may as well start showing itself. Overall, he’s beginning to resemble a delicate child.

I tell him this, and he says,“I used to think that if living in the world was natural and good, then living should rejuvenate you. I couldn’t understand why we didn’t start out old and decrepit and end up young and perfect.”

“That was before you realized that old and decrepit
is
perfect.”

He nods.

“Because everything is perfect.”

“That’s right.”

“I’m not agreeing with you. I’m quoting you.”

‘You’re merely considering the idea.”

“How do you choose between things, then? Why buy this and not that? Why be with this person and not that one?”

“It’s natural to be drawn to certain things and people more than to others.”

“So what’s wrong with being drawn to one above all others?”

“It isn’t wrong.”

I give his hand a small squeeze. “So why couldn’t you love me above all others?”

“I love you above all others I love.”

“You mean, if all your girlfriends were all drowning and you could only save one, it’d be me?”

He smiles. “You’re a good swimmer.”

I have to smile back. “I’d save you. I’d sacrifice anybody for you.”

“When I’m out of the way, that will change.”

“It won’t. You’ll take my love with you.”

“Don’t let that happen. Keep it for yourself.”

“What if I can’t? What if you take it anyway?”

He rolls onto his back and looks up at the ceiling. “I’m not taking anything. I’m travelling light.”

With Troy, I am the one loved unconditionally. I can go around with dirty hair, be boring and bad tempered. If I make an effort—and most of the time I try to—it’s for the luxury of giving pleasure to someone I don’t need to make any effort for. I still think about Abel off and on, and then there’s a hollowness in my chest, but after a while it is only the Abel feeling, supplanting all the other feelings I ever had for him, even love. That’s what I say, and believe. Talking about him with Troy, I take on a wry tone, not intentionally, it just creeps into my voice. Troy is such a sympathetic listener and so sure of himself that the worst he’ll say of Abel is,“He sounds complicated.” One time he said that he thought the two of them could have been friends.

“Of course you could have,” I said. “Everybody’s his friend. The town drunk is his friend. The local rapist is his friend.”

“Well, there you are,” said Troy, taking no offence.

And so he continually wins me.

He has a double-jointed right arm he can rotate at the shoulder, and he pretends to twist it off, it’s mine if I’ll be his bride. “Marriage is a dying institution,” I say. How about moving in with him, then? “Out of wedlock?” I say, feigning shock. He knows I’m not ready, he doesn’t push. Besides, we see each other at least four nights a week. He
cooks me supper—Shake ‘n Bake chicken, or chili con carne—and then we watch
TV
or listen to records or go to a movie. We make love all over his apartment, on rows of boxes, on every Danish-modern chair. Thursday nights he stays late at the store, which gives me a chance to catch up on my laundry and reading. Friday nights he meets a group of fellow draft dodgers at a Hungarian restaurant where the talk around the table is the anti-war movement and an underground literary magazine called
Rant
that they all seem to write for and that he partly finances, since he’s the only one with a steady job. Sometimes I drop by to listen to the passionate conversation, which I find far more comprehensible than any of their published poems and articles. On the weekends, Troy and I drive around in his car, maybe take a walk in the Beaches or out on Toronto Island. I still go to Greenwoods most Sunday afternoons, and a couple of times a month he joins me. My father and Mrs. Carver can’t praise him enough, nor he them. “Affable,” my father says in a tone of wonder. “The word for Troy is affable.” (Obviously he thought I’d end up with some hostile misfit.) And yet for all his affability and humour, Troy has no close friends, I’m not sure why. The draft dodgers find him a little too straight, I suspect. Aside from them, there’s only a belligerent record collector named Sammy, who browbeats us into smoking hash with him in the back room of the store. When it’s just Troy and me, by ourselves, we never smoke pot and we drink only the occasional beer or glass of wine. Troy says he wants to experience me with a clear head, he wants nothing in the way of his senses.

I say,“Me, too.”

Not quite the truth. What I want is for him to be nothing like Abel.

Which isn’t quite true either, since they are both sweet tempered and intelligent. It’s in the specifics that I can’t bear similarities. As a child Troy collected insects, and on our walks, if he identifies a beetle or a butterfly, I turn away. For the same reason, I won’t listen to Bach piano music, not with him. Troy’s theory is that the more he seems to resemble Abel, the more risk there is, in my mind, of his fooling around on me. When he says this, however, even when he reassures me without mentioning Abel’s name, all that does is remind me of what’s really going on. I can’t bear the resemblances because I can’t bear the discrepancies, how Troy comes up short: the collector of dead insects versus the venerator of live ones, the music lover versus the musician. The person with a hundred acquaintances and no close friends versus the person whose every acquaintance is a close friend. All so unjust and depressing. As an antidote I immediately launch into a mental cataloguing of Troy’s virtues, starting off with his devotion to me, his loyalty, and often that’s as far as I have to go before he steps out of Abel’s shadow and is himself. His good, deserving self.

Four years pass. When I think “four years” I have a sense of time unaccounted for and ungraspable as in a dream that takes only a minute to tell although it seemed to last all night. “The years slip by,” old people say. I now know what they mean: nothing much changes. Troy and I stay together. I keep working for Mr. Fraser, the two of us maintaining, just barely, the ruse of productivity. Twice I have
plodded through the files, reading, organizing, trying to distinguish living clients from dead ones. I was considering going through them again and typing up fresh labels when Mr. Fraser summoned me into his office and asked had I ever seen the movie
Days of Wine and Roses?
I told him no.

“With Lee Remick and Jack, uh … Jack …”

“I never saw it.”

“Jack … You know who I mean. Talks fast. Twitches his head around.”

“Jack Lemmon?”

“That’s it. Jack Lemmon. Now, then. There’s a girl, the Lee Remick character, smart as a whip. Secretary in a big, fancy firm, advertising, if I’m not mistaken. But the fellow that hired her can’t keep her busy enough, so what she does is, she sits at her desk reading an encyclopedia of world literature, one volume at a time. Not the literature itself, mind you.” His look sharpened. “What author are you at?”

I’ve told him how I’m working my way through the great novels in alphabetical order according to author. “George Eliot,” I said.
“Silas Marner.”

“E. M. Forster coming up. There’s a writer for you.”

“I’ve got to get through William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald first.”

“A Passage to India. Room with a View.”
He seemed to lose his train of thought.

“Lee Remick reads the encyclopedia,” I prompted.

“That’s right. You see, she never went to university. The way she figures it, by the time she has worked her way through to the end of the last volume she’ll have a bachelor’s degree in English literature under her belt.”

“Without the certificate.”

“Nothing but a piece of paper.”

‘You could say the same of a stock certificate.”

“Don’t get smart with me, young lady. The knowledge is the important thing, doesn’t matter a whit how you come by it. Now, then. Novels are all well and good, you know my feelings on that score, but people see a girl reading a novel at her desk and they think she’s dillydallying. An encyclopedia, on the other hand—a girl reading an encyclopedia, how do you know she isn’t researching something or other?”

He pulled himself to his feet and shuffled, all bent over, to his bookcase and removed the first volume of his set of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Clutching it in both hands, he came back and dropped it on the desk. His look was very intent. “Now, then. You read your way through all twenty-four volumes and, by golly, there’s a Ph.D. in general knowledge, right there.”

Eight months later, I’m at the end of volume three, which puts me among the fir’s: Brahms, Braille, Brain. Because I’m taking this seriously, trying to memorize key facts, progress is sluggish. And yet even at my most bored I never consider quitting or applying for another job within the company. How could I desert Mr. Fraser? Not that anyone aside from Lorna ever suggests I should. The draft dodgers think I have it made. As a secretary I’m nothing to them, but as a secretary who does nothing, I’m a subversive, and now that I’m spending my afternoons reading the encyclopedia—at my boss’s insistence, no less—I’m a star. A performer. “Ask me about any subject that starts with A or B,” I say,“up to Boswell.”

“Ares!” they shout. “Attila the Hun!” “Bismarck!”

Draft dodgers with warmongers on the brain.

I sometimes wonder if I’m living the life I’ve been waiting for or the one I’m making do with. Is a person meant to be content? I can’t believe I’ve entered a lasting state of mind. And the truth is, it does wear thin. Toward the end of every August, I start to feel anxious, which I realize is partly a hangover from when I used to get so upset about going back to school, but it’s more than that, it’s an accumulation of guilt and confusion over not moving in with Troy, resisting his patient, jokey pleas. Suddenly I’m restless for I don’t know what … something wild, a swerve from the straight and narrow.

In this mood Lorna becomes a kindred spirit. She says,“One day I swear I’m going to throw my typewriter out the window,” and instead of ignoring her, as I normally would, I say,“The windows here are unbreakable.”

“Okay,” she says,“down the stairs.”

“Can you imagine?” I say, because I
can.
You pick up your typewriter, lug it to the stairwell, you peer down those thirty-seven flights to make sure the coast is clear and then you … just … let go.

I dream about having sex with Abel. When I wake up, before I gain full consciousness, I’m aware of the Angel of Love flickering in the corner by my dresser. “Go away,” I think weakly.

Call him, she urges. Call him.

She’s hard to resist. The first year that I was going through this anxious period, I looked up the Richters’ phone number again. On the verge of dialling I grabbed the
newspaper and flipped through to the Classifieds. A new apartment, that’s what I needed. Something bigger, quieter.

I take it back, then, about nothing having changed in four years. Where I live has changed three times. And yet—I suppose because my furniture always comes with me—I never seem to experience any real upheaval. That is to say, upheaval is the point: fixable, household upheaval created to distract me from myself. As to where I end up, that hardly matters, I’m so rarely at home. Still, on the day of the move I always get vague, unreasonable expectations of greater fulfillment. Which are soon enough dashed. The first place I rented, a one-bedroom flat in an old Victorian mansion, had a prostitute living in the attic, clients always lurking on the porch, pounding on my door if they found hers locked. The second place had poisoned mice that staggered upstairs from the restaurant below and crawled into my shoes. A year later I was back in an old mansion, on the second floor this time, looking out onto a blue spruce tree that a cat burglar climbed so he could break into my living room and steal the record player and speakers Troy had given me as a house-warming gift. A house-warming gift! Though I never told Troy about my moving plans until after I’d signed the lease, he always took the news valiantly, more so each time, since with every move I migrated several blocks closer to his apartment.

“Pure coincidence,” I said the third time.

“Pure, unconscious desire,” he said.

“Abel, you know what I don’t understand?”

“What?”

“If everything and everybody is perfect, why do you drink?”

A pause and then,“Everything is perfect in itself.”

“Whether you drink or not.”

“Right.”

“But more perfect for
you
when you drink.” Another pause.

“We don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to.”

“Maybe that’s it.”

“What is?”

“That it’s more perfect.”

“But is it?”

“Louise, I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“What you feel. The truth.”

“I’m not escaping, I don’t feel that. I’m not
looking
for perfection.”