The Love Of A Good Woman

“Because-it-isn’t-good-enough.”

So I had to go and take the pillowcases off the pillows on the alcove bed and bring them out to her, and it did turn out that they were not a pair, though they had looked it to me. One was made of “good” fabric-that was hers-and the one in her hand was mine.

“I wouldn’t believe you hadn’t noticed,” she said, “if it was anybody but you.”

Chess had heard of another apartment. A real apartment, not a “suite”-it had a full bathroom and two bedrooms. A friend of his at work was leaving it, because he and his wife had bought a house. It was in a building at the corner of First Avenue and Macdonald Street. I could still walk to work, and he could take the same bus he took now. With two salaries, we could afford it.

The friend and his wife were leaving some furniture behind, which they would sell cheaply. It would not suit their new house, but to us it seemed splendid in its respectability. We walked around the bright third-story room admiring the cream-painted walls, the oak parquet, the roomy kitchen cupboards, and the tiled bathroom floor. There was even a tiny balcony looking out onto the leaves of Macdonald Park. We fell in love with each other in a new way, in love with our new status, our emergence into adult life from the basement that had been only a very temporary way station. It would be featured in our conversation as a joke, an endurance test, for years to come. Every move we made-the rented house, the first house we owned, the second house we owned, the first house in a different city-would produce this euphoric sense of progress and tighten our co

We gave our notice to Ray, without telling Mrs. Gorrie. That raised her to a new level of hostility. In fact, she went a little crazy.

“Oh, she thinks she’s so clever. She can’t even keep two rooms clean. When she sweeps the floor all she does is sweep the dirt into a corner.”

When I had bought my first broom I had forgotten to buy a dustpan, and for a time I had done that. But she could have known about it only if she let herself into our rooms with a key of her own while I was out. Which it became apparent that she had done.

“She’s a sneak, you know. I knew the first I saw of her what a sneak she was. And a liar. She isn’t right in the head. She’d sit down there and say she’s writing letters and she writes the same thing over and over again-it’s not letters, it’s the same thing over and over. She’s not right in the head.”

Now I knew that she must have uncrumpled the pages in my wastebasket. I often tried to start the same story with the same words. As she said, over and over again.

The weather had turned quite warm, and I went to work without a jacket, wearing a snug sweater tucked into my skirt, and a belt pulled to its tightest notch.

She opened the front door and yelled after me.

“Slut. Look at the slut, the way she sticks her chest out and wobbles her rear end. You think you’re Marilyn Monroe?”

And “We don’t need you in our house. The sooner you get out of here the better.”

She phoned up Ray and told him I was trying to steal her bed linen. She complained that I was telling stories about her up and down the street. She had opened the door to make sure I could hear, and she shouted into the phone, but this was hardly necessary, because we were on the same line and could listen in anytime we wanted to. I never did so-my instinct was to block my ears- but one evening when Chess was home he picked up the phone and spoke.

“Don’t pay any attention to her, Ray, she’s just a crazy old woman. I know she’s your mother, but I have to tell you she’s crazy.”

I asked him what Ray had said, whether he was angry at that. “He just said, ‘Sure, okay.’ “

Mrs. Gorrie had hung up and was shouting directly down the stairs, “I’ll tell you who’s crazy. I’ll tell you who’s a crazy liar spreading lies about me and my husband-”

Chess said, “We’re not listening to you. You leave my wife alone.” Later he said to me, “What does she mean about her and her husband?”

I said, “I don’t know.”

“She just has it in for you,” he said. “Because you’re young and nice-looking and she’s an old hag.

“Forget it,” he said, and made a halfway joke to cheer me up.

“What is the point of old women anyway?”

We moved to the new apartment by taxi with just our suitcases. We waited out on the sidewalk with our backs to the house. I expected some final screaming then, but there was not a sound.

“What if she’s got a gun and shoots me in the back?” I said.

“Don’t talk like her,” Chess said.

“I’d like to wave to Mr. Gorrie if he’s there.”

“Better not.”

I didn’t take a final look at the house, and I didn’t walk down that street, that block of Arbutus Street that faces the park and the sea, ever again. I don’t have a clear idea of what it looked like, though I remember a few things-the alcove curtain, the china cabinet, Mr. Gorrie’s green recliner-so well.

We got to know other young couples who had started out as we did, living in cheap spaces in other people’s houses. We heard about rats, cockroaches, evil toilets, crazy landladies. And we would tell about our crazy landlady. Paranoia.

Otherwise, I didn’t think of Mrs. Gorrie.

But Mr. Gorrie showed up in my dreams. In my dreams I seemed to know him before he knew her. He was agile and strong, but he wasn’t young, and he didn’t look any better than he did when I had read to him in the front room. Perhaps he could talk, but his talk was on the level of those noises I had learned to interpret-it was abrupt and peremptory, an essential but perhaps disdained footnote to the action. And the action was explosive, for these were erotic dreams. All the time that I was a young wife, and then, without undue delay, a young mother-busy, faithful, regularly satisfied-I kept having dreams now and then in which the attack, the response, the possibilities, went beyond anything life offered. And from which romance was banished. Decency as well. Our bed-Mr. Gorrie’s and mine-was the gravelly beach or the rough boat deck or the punishing coils of greasy rope. There was a relish of what you might call ugliness. His pungent smell, his jelly eye, his dog’s teeth. I woke out of these pagan dreams drained even of astonishment, or shame, and fell asleep again and woke with a memory I got used to denying in the morning. For years and years and surely long after he was dead Mr. Gorrie operated in my nightlife this way. Until I used him up, I suppose, the way we use up the dead. But it never seemed to be this way-that 1 was in charge, that I had brought him there. It seemed to be working both ways, as if he had brought me there, too, and it was his experience as much as it was mine.

And the boat and the dock and the gravel on the shore, the trees sky-pointed or crouching, leaning out over the water, the complicated profile of surrounding islands and dim yet distinct mountains, seemed to exist in a natural confusion, more extravagant and yet more ordinary than anything I could dream or invent. Like a place that will go on existing whether you are there or not, and that in fact is still there.

But I never saw the charred beams of the house fallen down on the body of the husband. That had happened a long time before and the forest had grown up all around it.