First Things First, page 31
Tonight, after she hangs up, she taps on Carmen’s door and slips into the dark room. “That’s pretty music,” she says and curls up on the bed with Carmen. She is wearing her chenille housecoat which falls half-open to reveal a shiny white slip with spaghetti straps and Carmen can see just the top of her mother’s breasts which are beautiful and luminous like the inside of seashells.
They wiggle around on the bed until they are both sitting propped against the headboard with the pillows behind them. Carmen lays her head against her mother’s shoulder and tells her all about Abraham. She tells her how he is kind, sensitive, intelligent, funny, warm, wise, healthy, peaceful, passionate, serious, generous, gentle, beautiful, and strong. How he is the man she’d almost given up hoping to meet, how he is the man she has had in her heart all along. She shows Maureen his picture in the locket.
Her father seems to have graciously accepted the fact that he can inhabit only the fringes of this moment and she can hear him paddling around in the kitchen in his slippers, humming and making cocoa and toast.
As she talks, Carmen feels like she has been doing this all her life. But the truth is she has not told her mother anything important since the time Mickey Roach kissed her on the mouth at recess and Carmen punched him in the nose.
Years later, there was the time Reg Henderson took her out to the airport parking lot where all the would-be lovers used to go and she let him touch her small breasts under her sweater and there was a tickling between her legs and she wanted him to touch her there but then she pushed him off her and felt sick to her stomach with loving it and hating it. She was crying when she got home and her hair was a mess and of course Maureen was waiting up for her but when she tried to talk to her, Maureen said, “I don’t want to hear about it,” and then she went to bed, leaving Carmen alone in the dark living room, trying to make sense of herself.
Years later still, there was the time Carmen called home long-distance and she was telling Maureen about the trip to Toronto she’d made that weekend with her boyfriend, Terry, and how their hotel room was so elegant, an oak four-poster bed with curtains and everything, and Maureen said, “I don’t want to hear about it”, and Carmen, in a flash of futile anger, said, “What the hell do you think I do out here—knit?” But Maureen was already talking about the new wallpaper they’d hung in the bathroom and Carmen couldn’t get another word in edgewise.
Now Carmen tells her mother that Abraham is the best lover she has ever had and Maureen doesn’t even flinch. She doesn’t laugh or change the subject either. She is silent and then she says, “Yes,” and her voice is smiling.
They talk about Abraham for two hours straight and the time passes so slowly that missing him is exquisite.
* * *
. . . I’m so lonesome I could cry . . .
Long after Maureen and Frank have gone to bed, Carmen is still awake. Listening to her parents giggling and whispering in bed, it occurs to her for the first time that they are in love, still in love.
When the phone on the night table rings, it is Abraham.
“I miss you,” he says and his voice is rich.
“When you get home,” he says, “I want to make love to you until you pass out.”
“I’ve been reading about lions,” he says, “who have been known to make love eighty times a day, and this,” he says, “is something to strive for.”
The sound of his voice in the dark makes her wet.
After Carmen hangs up, she thinks about a summer evening at Black Bridge Falls when they had been swimming, were sitting afterwards on the high grassy bank in their bathing suits, just watching the river flow. Carmen pushed him gently back onto the grass, pulled down his bathing suit, and took him into her mouth and he moaned and arched up towards her.
In the dark bedroom now, she pretends the cool sheets against her naked body are his skin against hers and she strokes her breasts until the nipples grow hard and she touches herself just the way he touches her and she imagines him watching her as she slides her own fingers in and out slowly, so slowly. But when she comes, she cries.
Falling asleep finally, she realizes that the man in the original memory was not Abraham at all, but Jason Campbell whom she dated ten years ago. And in real life, when she tugged at the waist of his bathing suit, Jason brushed her hand away as if it were an insect and said, “Don’t do that. Someone will see. Are you crazy?”
And so it is in the power of true love to alter everyone and everything that has gone before. All of your former lovers, it seems, are reduced to stand-ins, replaced now in your memories by the figure of the beloved. All of their lips have become his. All of their lips were his all along.
The thought of Abraham is so much with her that often she can’t tell whether she’s thinking of him or not. She knows this sounds crazy. But he is so much inside of her, that even when she is consciously thinking of other things, she is always aware too of his presence, or now of his absence, which is everywhere. She thinks of all the places they can touch each other when she gets home. They can turn each other inside out.
* * *
. . . I love you like October . . .
Autumn is their favourite season, when the sky is cool blue and the air is a tonic, sharp and invigorating after the humid muzzle of the summer heat. On Saturday, they go walking through the neighbourhood just at that hour when the lights have been lit but the curtains are still open and all the houses are emitting snug squares of yellow light into the deepening afternoon. Carmen knows that half the people inside those houses may well be bored to tears or hollering at each other but they look so contented from the outside that, when she walked like this before she met Abraham, she would be enveloped by a sickening liquid envy running through her like vinegar and, at the sight of lovers walking hand in hand, she would be swamped by a self-pity so caustic that it left her clenching her fists in pure rage, white-knuckled.
Now she and Abraham walk down to the park at the corner which has been abandoned these cool days by all but the faithful: a woman in a camel-hair coat walking her Cocker Spaniel, a group of half-grown boys in rubber boots and too-small sweaters playing hockey with a ball where the rink will be, another pair of lovers on a green wooden bench eating chocolate doughnuts with their mittens on.
Carmen and Abraham leave the paved pathways and shuffle through the fallen leaves piled so high in places that they are up to their knees and the colours fall away in front of them like noisy surf. They lie down together and the crispy leaves envelop them. As they put their arms around each other, a woman alone walks past, stares, and then averts her eyes. Carmen recognizes this woman as her own former self, fighting her way through another serious Saturday, jamming her fists into her pockets and heading home still alone, with the wasteland of another Sunday yet to come.
On the way home, they gather leaves, carefully selecting the best ones from among the millions under their feet: red, orange, yellow, one maple leaf gone so dark it looks black. At home, Carmen arranges the leaves on lengths of wax paper, places them between sheets of old newspaper, and then presses the whole package beneath the thick volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Abraham, in the living room, is putting on a tape: The last time I felt like this/I was in the wilderness/And the canyon was on fire/And I stood on the mountain/In the night/And I watched it burn/I watched it burn/I watched it burn.
As Carmen watches him from the doorway, he turns for a moment back into the stranger she met at the party, the man she knew nothing about, the man who could change her life if she let him.
At such a moment, unknowingly observed, the beloved becomes a singular distant miracle, a transcendent untouchable star. At such a moment, the lover is illuminated by the impossibility of love and of loss, galvanized by the immutable possibility of both. At this moment, the lovers may believe they are immortal.
Carmen goes up behind him and drapes her arm around his shoulders, nuzzling her face into his neck. “You smell like the leaves,” she says. “You smell like October.” He says this is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to him.
* * *
. . . I love you like a child . . .
In the dream, Carmen and Abraham are standing naked face to face but when she reaches out to stroke his neck, the rise of his breastbone, the curve of his hips, he feels like a blank wall covered with glossy white paint.
In the dream, Carmen is pregnant, her round belly slick with sweat and luminous, the way Maureen’s breasts were luminous, glistening like mother-of-pearl.
In the dream, Maureen is dead, laid out in a glass coffin covered with flowers and pendulous fruit. The funeral parlour is filled with singing strangers. Maureen says, “Listen. Can you hear me? Listen. Can you hear the sound of my eyes closing, the sound of my breath in your body, the sound of your head coming out from between my legs? Can you hear the singing? Can you hear the celebration?”
When Carmen wakes up sobbing, Abraham takes her in his arms and he says, “Cry, just cry. It’s all right to cry.”
In his arms like a child, she must give over her fear, all fear all grieving all trust all power, and she must deliver it there into his purified arms. And here is all the faith in the world, all the trust in tomorrow, and the possibility of finding and losing everything, and the rocking of a soul, these souls ecstatic in such sorrow such joy the attainment of all and every extraordinary life.
She is lying face-down on the big bed and he rubs her neck her shoulders, his hands drawing wordless circles into the small of her back, his tongue on her buttocks and the backs of her thighs.
She moves beneath him slowly so slowly and the sweetness runs out of her over his long fingers between her legs between her opening legs inside of her aching where she is aching and he slides in and slides in and slides in moving together sweating and he rubs his wet chest against her trembling back his teeth are on her neck and they are silent so silent they have never loved before in such excellent silence only breath and breathing they are only breathing the room is full of them and she can feel the hot liquid spurting into her and they are blossoms opening in an instant in what could be forever flowers unfurling the petals like pale skin encompassing all time and they are opening each other opening themselves to the world and there is room enough inside at last for everything room enough for all life new life and the serious suddenness of love and there can be no word for this or if there is a word and if they ever find it there will be nothing left to say and they are moaning and laughing and they will never be ordinary people again.
AS FAR AS IT GOES
(1990)
Jane’s lover Daniel has decided he is going to tell his wife on Thursday night. He is going to tell her the whole story. He is finally going to tell her the truth. He actually made the decision last Friday but due to extenuating circumstances (friends coming for the weekend, a conference which Anna, his wife, has to attend, then a dinner party they planned weeks ago), he couldn’t see his way clear to telling her the truth until Thursday.
On Thursday afternoon Jane has a staff meeting at work. She calls Daniel from the office just beforehand and tries to be strong and supportive on the phone. No one can guess what will happen once Anna knows. Daniel says he is just on his way to the liquor store for some whisky because he figures Anna will probably need it. Jane doesn’t hear a single word that is said at the staff meeting and is grateful that no one seems to expect her to contribute.
After the meeting she goes and picks up her son Nicholas at the daycare. Back home she orders a pizza for supper because she feels too rattled to cook. She eats standing up beside the sink which Nicholas thinks is very funny. She puts him to bed early because his innocent exuberance is making her feel irritable, which in turn makes her feel selfish and guilty, and in the end she cannot concentrate on him at all. She is extremely anxious but it is an exciting invigorating kind of anxiety. She cannot imagine how Daniel will begin the conversation but she is pretty sure that by the end of it Anna will throw him out.
Jane spends the rest of Thursday evening sitting at the kitchen table looking out the window at the rain. She can just picture Daniel coming up her driveway in the dark, his duffle bag in one hand and his heart in the other. She drinks three bottles of imported beer and listens to the classical music radio station. It isn’t so much that she’s big on classical music—in fact, she knows almost nothing about it—it’s just that she finds she can no longer listen to songs with words. All the tapes she owns, all the Top 40 songs, all the golden oldies, are far too laden with love, too fraught with implication and intimacy or the inevitable lack thereof. She remembers her friend Deborah telling her that when she was breaking up with her husband years ago she found she could no longer tolerate bright colours. She just wanted to live in a world of black and white and grey. Jane thinks she would like to live now in a world without lyrics.
At ten o’clock she turns the phone up as loud as it will go and then she goes to bed.
Surprisingly she sleeps very well.
* * *
Although she is off work on Friday, Jane gets up at six o’clock as usual and takes Nicholas to the daycare. She intends to do some work at home but as the morning wears on with still no word, she has to admit that she is accomplishing absolutely nothing. She cannot settle herself to anything. She wants to go out for a walk, having heard repeatedly from her more health-conscious friends, including Daniel himself, that physical exercise is the best antidote to anxiety. But she is afraid to leave the house in case Daniel calls or comes by. Finally after lunch she has to go out for more cigarettes. Although she’ll only be gone for fifteen minutes, she turns on her answering machine and tapes a note to the back door: Gone to the corner store. Back in a few minutes. Please wait.
She walks to the store and back as quickly as she can, having forgotten her umbrella, so that by the time she gets home her jacket is soaked through and her hair is hanging in strings that are dripping all over the kitchen floor. The note is still there, flapping soggily in the rising wind.
The afternoon passes somehow. Forever afterwards she will be unable to remember a single thing she did during those interminable hours.
At five o’clock she goes to get Nicholas, once again leaving a note and turning on the answering machine. They pick up Chinese food on the way home because she is still too jumpy to cook.
When they get back, Jane fairly pounces on the answering machine because the red light is flashing to indicate that a message has been recorded. But it is just her friend Deborah calling to see if Jane wants to go out for a drink later. Deborah’s daughter Karen will stay with Nicholas. Jane calls Deborah right back and says thanks but no thanks, she thinks she should stay close to home, she promised Daniel that she would be there whenever he needed her. Deborah sighs and says she understands. Jane suspects that Deborah is tired of hearing about Daniel and their difficulties anyway. She can see Deborah’s eyes glazing over as soon as she starts telling her the latest episode, upset, or hopeful sign. Of course Deborah still listens, giving advice and trying to cheer her up, but Jane can sense her impatience with the whole story. Deborah is just waiting now for Jane to snap out of it and get back to normal. But Jane cannot imagine when or how that will happen. Jane can barely remember what “normal” means.
After supper Jane shows Nicholas how to build a castle with his Lego and then she helps him finish putting the stickers into his new Sticker Dictionary:
A is for apple. An apple is a round fruit that grows on trees. A juicy red apple is delicious to eat.
B is for banana. A banana is a curved yellow fruit. The monkey ate the banana, peel and all. . . .
At eight o’clock she says, “It’s time to find a clean pair of pajamas and get into bed.”
Nicholas says, “What’s a pair?”
Jane explains that a pair means two, like a pair of shoes or a pair of socks. Two people are a pair. Three people are a triangle. Three people are a torment. But of course she doesn’t tell him this part.
Nicholas grins suddenly and says, “Oh I get it! Two is a pear and one is an apple.”
Jane tucks him in and goes back to her vigil at the kitchen table. She can’t sit in the living room because she cannot let herself think about the times she and Daniel made love there on the soft pink couch, lying there afterwards curled up naked and marvelling how well all parts of their bodies fit together. The kitchen is a slightly more neutral territory although it too can become crowded with memories of meals they cooked together: feeding each other mushrooms fried in butter, crisp steamed broccoli, tender chunks of beef plucked from the bubbling stroganoff, kissing at the stove with the food fragrant all around them while Nicholas got underfoot and sang. Perhaps because she’s lost her appetite now, these memories are easier to avoid.
The wind is rising and the rain pours down. Nicholas calls out to her in a panicky voice, “Mom, will it thunder?”
Jane says, “No, don’t worry, it won’t thunder.”
Satisfied, Nicholas sings a few rounds of the song he’s just learned at daycare: “Row row row your boat/Gently down the stream/Merrily merrily merrily/Life is but a dream,” and then he goes to sleep. Briefly Jane envies how easily and totally he can be reassured.
Again she spends the evening waiting, but still there is no word from Daniel. She cannot decide what this might mean. The possibilities seem to expand exponentially as the darkness falls slowly down the wet street.
* * *
On Saturday morning Jane wakes up feeling ambitious and energetic in spite of herself. While Nicholas watches cartoons, she whips up a batch of baking soda biscuits with cheese and they eat them still warm with lots of butter and a bowl of fresh strawberries. After breakfast she washes down the kitchen walls, a job she’s been meaning to get at for nearly six months. The water in the bucket turns brown with accumulated grime and nicotine. Nicholas mucks happily around in the soapy water until his shirt and pants are soaked.
