Where She Has Gone (8 page)

His father, though he’d never approved of the marriage, had hardly spoken to him since the split. He was like that, Michael said. Twenty years before, he had disowned Michael’s oldest sister when she had got pregnant out of wedlock. She had eventually married, got a good job, had more children. But in all those years their father had never spoken to her again.

“You have to understand what that’s like. What kind of a mind it takes to cut off one of your children like that. But here’s the thing: a couple of years ago Suzie and I went to Italy and I got talking to this old woman in the village who told me my mother was already pregnant with my sister when she got married. There was even some talk that my dad wasn’t the
father. It all made sense then, in a kind of crazy way. But to think we went all our lives without understanding that. Even my sister didn’t know.”

I could picture Michael’s village, its stony houses and mountain solitude, and his father there a gloomy young man like my own, hemmed in by his limited possibilities.

“To tell you the truth,” Michael said, “I think that’s why Suzie left me. She started to see my father in me. She could never forgive him for what he did to my sister. But the funny thing is, I could. Even after I found out, or maybe because of that. You’d think it would have the opposite effect, but all I could see then was the pain this guy had gone through. It’s like something that’s blinded him.”

We were not so different, then, Michael and I, though I hadn’t known this, had the same family entanglements, the same receding into darkness and sin. Perhaps all families were like this, were hard exactly because of their failings, were then fated through that hardness to repeat the very things they sought to avert.

“How are things with your sister?” Michael said.

“Oh. All right.”

“You’re still getting along?”

“Off and on. It’s a bit complicated.”

“It always is.”

It grew late. Michael offered to drive me to the subway.

“I have a car,” I said. “My father’s old car.”

“A sort of hand-me-down?”

I had never told him about my father’s death. It seemed ungenerous not to do so now, but it was too much to cram into a moment at the door.

“Something like that.”

We stood an instant on his front steps. There would be time, I thought, time to tell him things; and yet somehow I had the sense also that time was running out, that soon I’d be past the point of telling.

“If you ever need anything,” I said.

“Thanks.”

I drove home. It was warm out, almost balmy, the air laden with smells that the winter had held in check. In the damp warmth, the lingering piles of dirty snow in parking lots and at the edges of driveways looked alien, anachronistic. As a child in Italy, at this time of year, I would wander sometimes above our village with my friend Fabrizio to search out the snowfields still nestled among the higher slopes, playing with him there as if in full winter while below us the valley lay stretched out already coloured over by the wheat- and olive-greens of spring. It had given me a peculiar sense of disorientation, the unnaturalness of that like some secret transgression, some line between absolutes that we had blurred.

The lights were still on in Sid’s apartment when I arrived home. For a long time I stood across the street in the darkness of a burnt-out streetlight, watching. There was movement across the newsprint over his windows, vague shapes I couldn’t decipher. Then one by one the lights began to go out until only the small, flickering glow of what must have been a candle remained, casting a long shadow onto one of the windows before finally receding from view, as if someone had picked it up and carried it into a far room.

Sid’s bedroom was directly above my own. When he had women home, the floorboards would send messages like code – not even quite so much noise as small, telltale reverberations, what fell between sound and simple tremor, like the
groan that went through the building when a streetcar went by. Eventually my body had begun to register these cues almost instinctively, with a strange combination of repulsion and arousal; and sometimes I would awake to them in the middle of the night and fall back into troubled, sexual dreams, dreams of watching, dreams of being exposed.

I waited outside ten minutes, fifteen, then longer, sitting smoking in the car with the window down and the radio on the way I’d sometimes snuck cigarettes at home as a teen. Then finally I made my way up the fire escape to my apartment, and to bed.

I awoke, to a commotion, in darkness: there was a pounding somewhere, frenzied or soft, imagined or real, I wasn’t sure which. For a moment I felt the panic I’d felt sometimes as a child, waking up in the dark and not remembering where I was.

The sound again: a knock at the fire-escape door.

It was Rita.

“I’m sorry about this.”

She had been crying. Her eyes were puffy; her make-up was smudged like runny watercolour.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. I’m sort of messed up.”

She broke into sobs.

“Are you coming from Sid’s?”

“Yeah.”

“He didn’t hurt you?”

“No. It’s nothing like that. It’s just – I don’t know.”

“It’s okay. Everything’s going to be all right.”

I got her onto the living-room couch. She was wearing the same skirt and blouse she’d had on when she’d come by earlier in the week. The blouse was untucked a bit at the back like a sloppy child’s.

“I’ll make you some coffee,” I said.

“Thanks.”

I took a seat across from her while the coffee brewed, self-conscious suddenly at being only in my bathrobe.

“So I guess you had a bit of a rough night.”

“Yeah. I’m really sorry about this.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about.”

She took a Kleenex from her purse and wiped at her tears.

“I should probably just go,” she said.

“You don’t have to do that.”

I brought the coffee in. She had pulled herself together a bit, had tucked in her blouse, had dabbed some of the mascara from her eyes.

She was sitting at the very edge of the couch as if ready for flight.

“We could talk about this, if you want,” I said. “We don’t have to.”

“There’s nothing to say, really. It’s just stupid.”

“Yeah. Maybe not so stupid.”

I watched her hands as she picked up her cup. There was the barest tremor in them, an infinitesimal lack of control.

“This is my fault,” I said. “Not just you and Sid. The whole situation.”

“It’s no one’s fault. It’s my fault. I guess I was trying to prove something to you.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Outside, it had started to rain. A streetcar passed by, a low, rumbling churn of metal against metal. In the corner window I saw it float like a phantom through the misted night-time desertion of College Street.

“It’s raining,” I said. “Maybe you should just stay here for the night.”

“I’ve already bothered you enough as it is.”

“You haven’t bothered me. I’m glad you came here.”

“Are you?”

“Yes.”

She was still perched on the edge of the couch.

“I suppose Elena would be worried,” I said.

“I called her from Sid’s before. She’s not really expecting me.”

“Oh.” We both seemed to feel the same shame and relief at this. “Then I’ll fix the bed for you. I can take the couch.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“It’s nothing.”

I changed the bedsheets with an old linen set I had from home and put out a bathrobe. The robe, in a fusty blue check, was one my father had worn when he was in hospital years before. I’d been surprised when I took it over from him at how small it fit on me.

Rita came to the door. She had washed her make-up away to leave just a puffy tiredness around her eyes, as if she’d just risen from sleep.

“I’m not sure I have any pyjamas for you.”

“Maybe just an old T-shirt or something.”

She changed for bed while I fixed up the couch.

“Can I get you anything?”

“No. Maybe a glass of water.”

“I’ll bring it in.”

She was sitting on the edge of the bed in my father’s robe when I went in. She had draped her clothes over the bedside chair, the strap of a bra dangling from them.

I sat down beside her.

“Are you feeling any better?”

“Yes. Thanks. You’ve been great.”

The tension of the previous days seemed forgotten, as if we’d somehow circled back to the moment that had preceded it, before the confusion had set in.

“I guess things have been a little strange between us lately,” I said.

“Yeah. It’s been hard.”

“That day at the Falls. I didn’t mean – I’m not sure what I meant.”

“It didn’t feel wrong, if that’s what you’re saying. It’s just afterwards –”

“Yes.”

The only light was the dim glow of the bedside lamp. The particular angle it caught Rita at made her look changed, softer but also more sage, more sad, as if some hidden side of her had been revealed.

“Maybe we’re not normal,” she said. “I just think – how things worked out between us. How mixed up it’s been.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

She had half-turned her face from me so that her hair, slightly tangled and still damp either from her tears or from when she’d washed, cut off my view of her.

“Sometimes I feel like I’ve never had anything,” she said. “Anything that was really mine.”

“I know what that’s like. I suppose I always thought that
you
were what was mine.”

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t know. Just that. That I wasn’t anything, really, except for you. I guess I hated you for that in some ways.”

“And now?”

“Not now.”

She was still half-turned from me.

“Would it be all right if you held me for a bit?” she said.

“I think so.”

I put my arms around her. She had started crying again.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just feel – I don’t know. There’s no way to put it.”

“It’s all right.”

I held her. There was a moment then that was like falling into a kind of darkness, like the two of us opening a door in a dream and stepping out; and then we were kissing. There seemed no decision in this, just a giving-in to the darkness, to the falling. The darkness was like a tangible thing, what the world had been stripped down to; only our lips had vision within it, probing along the contours of skin and bone until they met with an instant’s small, delicious cushioning of padded flesh on padded flesh.

We were still falling. There seemed no distance between us now, just this awful relinquishing as if everything were unfolding at once unreal and yet inevitable, having nothing to do with us and yet what our lives had always been moving toward. I slipped her robe from her shoulders, pulled her T-shirt up so that finally she lay before me with her breasts, her belly exposed like the pale underside of some infinitely fragile thing; and then I was lying beside her, kissing her, running my hands against her skin, doing these things and being inside the doing of them and yet seeing them as if their
reality were merely a mirroring of something already lived through, that had already long ago been done and atoned for.

I entered her. There was an instant then when we were looking directly into each other’s eyes, when what was going on with our bodies seemed merely the adjunct to this moment of unblinking sight. There was something almost ruthless in us then, hopeless, the instantaneous mutual admission of wrong and its flouting. There would be this one time, we seemed to say, when the world would split open and every unspeakable hope, every desire, every fear, would be permitted. Then I came and it was as if we had suddenly dropped to earth again.

We lay several minutes without speaking. Rita had wrapped herself in her robe again.

“Are you all right?” I said.

“Yes.”

In the dim light our voices seemed disembodied. There was a mood between us of blank calm like the unrippled surface of a pool; but it seemed the slightest word, the slightest thought, might disturb it.

“Maybe we should get under the covers,” I said.

We fell asleep cradled against one another like children. In the first haze of sleepfulness what I felt to be holding her, to have her there in my bed and be able to run a hand if I wished along the whole, smooth plane of her body, was the sort of matter-of-fact elation I felt on first waking from dreams of flying: there was always a moment then when the thing seemed truly possible, because of the way in the dream it had come about not like some miracle but like the slow working out of mathematical law, something that had had to be worked toward, tested, refined, till at last my heaviness gave way to willed, precarious flight.

But then as I fell deeper into sleep, further and further away from the place where we’d been together, where things had made sense, the horror began to take shape. It began with just a gnawing at the back of my mind like the onset of a fever dream, the scrambling search for a solution to a question that refused to take solid form; and then gradually it grew into a kind of panic. I was running, running, through deserted night-time streets, down subway stairwells, through dim, blue-lit passageways only just wide enough to slip through; and there was something I was moving toward or away from, it was never clear which, something inevitable and large, unnameable, but also, in a way, banal, all the more horrible for that.

I awoke, with a start, toward dawn. Rita was still beside me, turned away now and sprawled face-down like someone who had fallen from a building. Her breathing was rhythmic but shallow; once she sucked in her breath as if at some sudden fright, then resumed her regular rhythm again. I could smell her there beside me, a complex mixture of sweat and sex and a soapy, milky scent that made me think of how her pillow had smelled when we’d slept together as children years before.

I slipped out of bed to the bathroom. There was blood on me from her, I saw now. There were smears of it on my fingers, on my thighs; in the morning there would be dried stains on the covers and sheets. I tried not to think of what this meant, how dire, perhaps, this made things. I remembered the wedding jokes about bedsheets when I was a child in Italy, how strange they had struck me then, how brutal a thing they had made marriage seem.