Страница 55 из 74
“They might have been buddies of a sort. All those lost souls up north.”
“What did you talk to him about?”
“He told me about one time he took Jonas up to teach him to fly. He said, ‘Never again.’”
Then he asked, “Didn’t he drive you someplace? Where?”
“To Ly
“So what did you talk about?”
“I found him hard to talk to.”
The fact that he was dead did not seem to have much effect on her daydreams-if that was what you could call them. The ones in which she imagined chance meetings or even desperately arranged reunions, had never had a foothold on reality, in any case, and were not revised because he was dead. They had to wear themselves out in a way she did not control and never understood.
When she was on her way home that night it had started to rain, not very hard. She had stayed out on the deck of the ferry. She got up and walked around and could not sit down again on the lid of the life-jacket bin without getting a big wet spot on her dress. So she stayed looking at the froth stirred up in the wake of the boat, and the thought occurred to her that in a certain kind of story-not the kind that anybody wrote anymore-the thing for her to do would be to throw herself into the water. Just as she was, packed full of happiness, rewarded as she would surely never be again, every cell in her body plumped up with a sweet self-esteem. A romantic act that could be seen-from a forbidden angle-as supremely rational.
Was she tempted? She was probably just letting herself imagine being tempted. Probably nowhere near yielding, though yielding had been the order of that day.
It wasn’t until after Pierre was dead that she remembered one further detail.
Asher had driven her to Horseshoe Bay, to the ferry. He had got out of the car and come around to her side. She was standing there, waiting to say good-bye to him. She made a move towards him, to kiss him-surely a natural thing to do, after the last few hours-and he had said, “No.”
“No,” he said. “I never do.”
Of course that wasn’t true, that he never did. Never kissed out in the open, where anybody could see. He had done it just that afternoon, at Prospect Point.
No.
That was simple. A cautioning. A refusal. Protecting her, you might say, as well as himself. Even if he hadn’t bothered about that, earlier in the day.
I never do was something else altogether. Another kind of cautioning. Information that could not make her happy, though it might be intended to keep her from making a serious mistake. To save her from the false hopes and humiliation of a certain kind of mistake.
How did they say good-bye, then? Did they shake hands? She could not remember.
But she heard his voice, the lightness and yet the gravity of his tone, she saw his resolute, merely pleasant face, she felt the slight shift out of her range. She didn’t doubt that the recollection was true. She did not see how she could have suppressed it so successfully, for all this time.
She had an idea that if she had not been able to do that, her life might have been different.
How?
She might not have stayed with Pierre. She might not have been able to keep her balance. Trying to match what had been said at the ferry with what had been said and done earlier the same day would have made her more alert and more curious. Pride or contrariness might have played a part-a need to have some man eat those words, a refusal to learn her lesson-but that wouldn’t have been all. There was another sort of life she could have had-which was not to say she would have preferred it. It was probably because of her age (something she was always forgetting to take account of) and because of the thin cool air she breathed since Pierre’s death, that she could think of that other sort of life simply as a kind of research which had its own pitfalls and achievements.
Maybe you didn’t find out so much, anyway. Maybe the same thing over and over-which might be some obvious but unsettling fact about yourself. In her case, the fact that prudence-or at least some economical sort of emotional management-had been her guiding light all along.
The little self-preserving movement he made, the kind and deadly caution, the attitude of inflexibility that had grown a bit stale with him, like an outmoded swagger. She could view him now with an everyday mystification, as if he had been a husband. She wondered if he’d stay that way, or if she had some new role waiting for him, some use still to put him to in her mind, during the time ahead.
Queenie
“Maybe you better stop calling me that,” Queenie said, when she met me at Union Station.
I said, “What? Queenie?”
“Stan doesn’t like it,” she said. “He says it reminds him of a horse.”
It was more of a surprise to me to hear her say “Stan” than it was to have her let me know she wasn’t Queenie anymore, she was Lena. But I could hardly have expected that she would still be calling her husband Mr. Vorguilla after a year and a half of marriage. During that time I hadn’t seen her, and when I’d caught sight of her a moment ago, in the group of people waiting in the station, I almost hadn’t recognized her.
Her hair was dyed black and puffed up around her face in whatever style it was that in those days succeeded the beehive. Its beautiful corn-syrup color-gold on top and dark underneath-as well as its silky length, was forever lost. She wore a yellow print dress that skimmed her body and ended inches above her knees. The Cleopatra lines drawn heavily around her eyes, and the purply shadow, made her eyes seem smaller, not larger, as if they were deliberately hiding. She had pierced ears now, gold hoops swinging from them.
I saw her look at me with some surprise as well. I tried to be bold and easygoing. I said, “Is that a dress or a frill around your bum?” She laughed, and I said, “Was it ever hot on the train. I’m sweating like a pig.”
I could hear how my voice sounded, as twangy and hearty as my stepmother Bet’s.
Sweating like a pig.
Now on the streetcar going to Queenie’s place I couldn’t stop sounding stupid. I said, “Are we still downtown?” The high buildings had been quickly left behind, but I didn’t think you could call this area residential. The same sort of shops and buildings went on over and over again-a dry cleaner, a florist, a grocery store, a restaurant. Boxes of fruit and vegetables out on the sidewalk, signs for dentists and dressmakers and plumbing suppliers in the second-story windows. Hardly a building higher than that, hardly a tree.
“It’s not the real downtown,” said Queenie. “Remember I showed you where Simpson’s was? Where we got on the streetcar? That’s the real.”
“So are we nearly there?” I said.
She said, “We got a ways to go yet.”
Then she said, “‘Way.’ Stan doesn’t like me saying ‘ways’ either.”
The repetition of things, or maybe the heat, was making me feel anxious and rather sick. We were holding my suitcase on our knees and only a couple of inches ahead of my fingers was a man’s fat neck and bald head. A few black, sweaty long hairs clung to his scalp. For some reason I had to think of Mr. Vorguilla’s teeth in the medicine cabinet, which Queenie showed me when she worked for the Vorguillas next door. That was long before Mr. Vorguilla could ever be thought of as Stan.
Two joined teeth sitting beside his razor and shaving brush and the wooden bowl holding his hairy and disgusting shaving soap.
“That’s his bridge,” Queenie had said.
Bridge?
“Bridge of teeth.”
“Yuck,” I said.
“These are his extras,” she said. “He’s wearing his others.”
“Yuck. Aren’t they yellow?”
Queenie put her hand over my mouth. She didn’t want Mrs. Vorguilla to hear us. Mrs. Vorguilla was lying downstairs on the dining-room couch. Her eyes were closed most of the time, but she might not be sleeping.