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“I could tell,” she said with some impatience. “I used to be a devil myself.”
Her voice-the quaver or titter in it-was not like any voice of hers that Meriel remembered. She felt as if there was some betrayal stirring, in this suddenly strange old woman. A betrayal of the past, perhaps of Meriel’s mother and the friendship she had treasured with a superior person. Or of those lunches with Meriel herself, the rarefied conversations. Some degradation was in the offing. Meriel was upset by this, remotely excited.
“Oh, I used to have friends,” Aunt Muriel said, and Meriel said, “You had lots of friends.” She mentioned a couple of names.
“Dead,” Aunt Muriel said.
Meriel said no, she had seen something just recently in the paper, a retrospective show or an award.
“Oh? I thought he was dead. Maybe I’m thinking of somebody else-Did you know the Delaneys?”
She spoke directly to the man, not to Meriel.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “No.”
“Some people who had a place where we all used to go, on Bowen Island. The Delaneys. I thought you might have heard of them. Well. There were various goings-on. That’s what I meant when I said I used to be a devil. Adventures. Well. It looked like adventures, but it was all according to script, if you know what I mean. So not so much of an adventure, actually. We all got drunk as skunks, of course. But they always had to have the candles lit in a circle and the music on, of course-more like a ritual. But not altogether. It didn’t mean you mightn’t meet somebody new and let the script go all to hell. Just meet for the first time and start kissing like mad and run off into the forest. In the dark. You couldn’t get very far. Never mind. Struck down.”
She had started to cough, tried speaking through the cough, gave up and hacked violently. The doctor got up and struck her expertly a couple of times, on her bent back. The coughing ended with a groan.
“Better,” she said. “Oh, you knew what you were doing, but you pretended not to. One time they had a blindfold on me. Not out in the woods, this was inside. It was all right, I consented. It didn’t work so well, though-I mean, I did know. There probably wasn’t anybody there that I wouldn’t have recognized, anyway.”
She coughed again, though not so desperately as before. Then she raised her head, breathed deeply and noisily for a few minutes, holding up her hands to stall the conversation, as if she would soon have something more, something important, to say. But all she did, finally, was laugh and say, “Now I’ve got a permanent blindfold. Cataracts. Doesn’t get me taken advantage of now, not in any debauch that I know about.”
“How long have they been growing?” the doctor said with a respectful interest, and to Meriel’s great relief there began an absorbed conversation, an informed discussion about the ripening of cataracts, their removal, the pros and cons of this operation, and Aunt Muriel’s distrust of the eye doctor who was shunted off-as she said-to look after the people in here. Salacious fantasy-that was what Meriel now decided it had been-slid without the smallest difficulty into a medical chat, agreeably pessimistic on Aunt Muriel’s side and carefully reassuring on the doctor’s. The sort of conversation that must take place regularly within these walls.
In a little while there was a glance exchanged between Meriel and the doctor, asking whether the visit had lasted long enough. A stealthy, considering, almost married glance, its masquerade and its bland intimacy arousing to those who were after all not married.
Soon.
Aunt Muriel took the initiative herself. She said, “I’m sorry, it’s rude of me, I have to tell you, I get tired.” No hint in her ma
Around a corner, with doors open on rooms where people lay asleep or perhaps watching from their beds, the doctor touched her between her shoulder blades and moved his hand down her back to her waist. She realized that he was picking at the cloth of her dress, which had stuck to her damp skin when she sat pressed against the chairback. The dress was also damp under her arms.
And she had to go to the bathroom. She kept looking for the Visitors’ Washrooms, which she thought she had spotted when they were on their way in.
There. She was right. A relief, but also a difficulty, because she had to move suddenly out of his range and to say, “Just a moment,” in a voice that sounded to herself distant and irritated. He said, “Yes,” and briskly headed for the Men’s, and the delicacy of the moment was lost.
When she went out into the hot sunlight she saw him pacing by the car, smoking. He hadn’t smoked before-not in Jonas’s parents’ house or on the way here or with Aunt Muriel. The act seemed to isolate him, to show some impatience, perhaps an impatience to be done with one thing and get on to the next. She was not so sure now, whether she was the next thing or the thing to be done with.
“Where to?” he said, when they were driving. Then, as if he thought he had spoken too brusquely, “Where would you like to go?” It was almost as if he was speaking to a child, or to Aunt Muriel-somebody he was bound to entertain for the afternoon. And Meriel said, “I don’t know,” as if she had no choice but to let herself become that burdensome child. She was holding in a wail of disappointment, a clamor of desire. Desire that had seemed to be shy and sporadic but inevitable, yet was now all of a sudden declared inappropriate, one-sided. His hands on the wheel were all his own, reclaimed as if he had never touched her.
“How about Stanley Park?” He said. “Would you like to go for a walk in Stanley Park?”
She said, “Oh, Stanley Park. I haven’t been there for ages,” as if the idea had perked her up and she could imagine nothing better. And she made things worse by adding, “It’s such a gorgeous day.”
“It is. It is indeed.”
They spoke like caricatures, it was unbearable.
“They don’t give you a radio in these rented cars. Well, sometimes they do. Sometimes not.”
She wound her window down as they crossed the Lion’s Gate Bridge. She asked him if he minded.
“No. Not at all.”
“It always means summer to me. To have the window down and your elbow out and the breeze coming in-I don’t think I could ever get used to air-conditioning.”
“Certain temperatures, you might.”
She willed herself to silence, till the forest of the park received them, and the high, thick trees could perhaps swallow witlessness and shame. Then she spoiled everything by her too appreciative sigh.
“Prospect Point.” He read the sign aloud.
There were plenty of people around, even though it was a weekday afternoon in May, with vacations not yet started. In a moment they might remark on that. There were cars parked all along the drive up to the restaurant, and line-ups on the viewing platform for the coin-use binoculars.
“Aha.” He had spotted a car pulling out of its place. A reprieve for a moment from any need for speech, while he idled, backed to give it room, then maneuvered into the fairly narrow spot. They got out at the same time, walked around to meet on the sidewalk. He turned this way and that, as if deciding where they were to walk. Walkers coming and going on any path you could see.
Her legs were shaking, she could not put up with this any longer.
“Take me somewhere else,” she said.
He looked her in the face. He said, “Yes.”
There on the sidewalk in the world’s view. Kissing like mad.
Take me, was what she had said. Take me somewhere else, not Let’s go somewhere else. That is important to her. The risk, the transfer of power. Complete risk and transfer. Let’s go-that would have the risk, but not the abdication, which is the start for her-in all her reliving of this moment-of the erotic slide. And what if he had abdicated in his turn? Where else? That would not have done, either. He has to say just what he did say. He has to say, Yes.