“Would you do anything for me?” he says, gazing into my eyes. I sway toward him, far away from the earth. Yes would be so easy.
“No,” I say. This is a surprise to me. I don’t know where it has come from, this unexpected and stubborn truthfulness. It sounds rude.
“I did not think so,” he says sadly.
Jon appears one afternoon in the Swiss Chalet. I don’t recognize him at first because I don’t look at him. I’m wiping off the table with a dishrag, every movement an effort, my arm heavy with lethargy. Last night I was with Josef, but tonight I won’t be because it’s not my night, it’s Susie’s night. These days Josef rarely mentions Susie. When he does, it’s with nostalgia, as if she’s already a thing of the past, or beautifully dead, like someone in a poem. But this may be only his way of speaking. They may spend prosaic domestic evenings together, him reading the paper while she serves up a casserole. Despite his claim that I am a secret, they may discuss me the way Josef and I used to discuss Susie. This is not a comfortable thought.
I prefer to think of Susie as a woman shut inside a tower, up there in The Monte Carlo on Avenue Road, gazing out the window over the top of her painted sheet metal balcony, weeping feebly, waiting for Josef to appear. I can’t imagine her having any other life apart from that. I can’t see her washing out her underpants, for instance, and wringing them in a towel, hanging them on the bathroom towel rack, as I do. I can’t imagine her eating. She is limp, without will, made spineless by love; as I am.
“Long time no see,” says Jon. He leaps into focus beyond my wiping arm, grinning at me, his teeth white in a face more tanned than I remember. He’s leaning on the table I’m wiping, wearing a gray T-shirt, old jeans cut off above the knees, running shoes with no socks. He looks healthier than he did in the winter. I’ve never seen him in the daytime before.
I’m conscious of my stained uniform: do I smell of underarm sweat, of chicken fat? “How did you get in here?” I say.
“Walked,” he says. “How about a coffee?”
He has a summer job, with the Works Department, filling in potholes in the roads, tarring over the cracks made by frost heave; he does have a faint tarry smell about him. He’s not what you would call clean.
“How about a beer, later?” he says. This is a thing he’s said often before: he wants a passport to the Ladies and Escorts, as usual. I’m not doing anything, so I say, “Why not? But I’ll have to change.”
After work I take the precaution of a shower and put on my purple dress. I meet him at the Maple Leaf and we go into the Ladies and Escorts. We sit there in the gloom, which is at least cool, and drink draft beer. It’s awkward with just him: before there was always a group of them. Jon asks me what I’ve been up to and I say nothing much. He asks me if I’ve seen Uncle Joe around anywhere, and I say no.
“Probably he’s disappeared into Susie’s knickers,” he says. “The lucky shit.” He’s still treating me like an honorary boy, still saying crude things about women. I’m surprised at the word knickers. He must have picked it up from Colin the Englishman. I wonder if he knows about me as well, whether he’s making remarks about my knickers behind my back. But how could he?
He says the Works Department is good money, but he doesn’t let on to the other guys that he’s a painter, especially not to the old regulars. “They might think I’m a fruit or something,” he says. I drink more draft beer than I should, and then the lights flicker on and off and it’s closing time. We walk out onto the hot night summer street, and I don’t want to go home by myself.
“Can you get back all right?” says Jon. I say nothing. “Come on, I’ll walk you,” he says. He puts his hand on my shoulder and I smell his smell of tar and outdoors dust and sunny skin, and I begin to cry. I stand in the street, with the drunks staggering out of the Men Only, my hands pressed to my mouth, crying and feeling stupid.
Jon is startled. “Hey, pal,” he says, patting me awkwardly. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I say. Being called pal makes me cry even more. I feel like a wet sock; I feel ugly. I hope he will think I’ve had too much to drink.
He puts an arm around me, gives a squeeze. “Come on,” he says. “We’ll go for coffee.”
I stop crying as we walk along the street. We walk to a door beside a wholesale suitcase store, he takes out a key, and we go up the stairs in the dark. Inside the upstairs door he kisses me, with his tarry, beery mouth. There are no lights on. I put my arms around his waist and hold on as if I’m sinking into mud, and he lifts me like that and carries me through the dark room, bumping into the walls and furniture, and we fall together onto the floor.
Eleven — Falling Woman
Chapter 56
I continue east along Queen Street, still a little dizzy from the wine at lunch. Tipsy was once the word. Alcohol’s a depressant, it will let me down later, but right now I’m jaunty, I hum to myself, mouth slightly open.
Right here there’s a group of statues, coppery-green, with black smears running down them like metal blood: a seated woman, holding a scepter, with three young soldiers marching forward grouped around her, their legs wound with bandagelike puttees, defending the Empire, their faces earnest, doomed, frozen into time. Above them on a stone tablet stands another woman, this time with angel wings: Victory or Death, or maybe both. This monument is in honor of the South African War, ninety years ago, more or less. I wonder if anyone remembers that war, or if anyone in all these cars barging forward ever even looks.
I head north on University Avenue, past the sterility of hospitals, along the old route of the Santa Claus Parade. The Zoology Building has been torn down, it must have been years ago. The window ledge where I once watched the soggy fairies and chilblained snowflakes, breathing in the smell of snakes and antiseptic and mice, is now empty air. Who else remembers where it used to be?
There are fountains up and down this roadway now, and squared-off beds of flowers, and new, peculiar statues. I follow the curve around the Parliament Building with its form of a squatting Victorian dowager, darkish pink, skirts huffed out, stolid. The flag I could never draw, demoted to the flag of a province, flies before it, bright scarlet, with the Union Jack in the top corner and all those impossible beavers and leaves encrested lower down. The new national flag flutters there as well, two red bands and a red maple leaf rampant on white, looking like a trademark for margarine of the cheaper variety, or an owl kill in snow. I still think of this flag as new, although they changed it long ago.
I cross the street, cut in behind a small church, left stranded here when they redeveloped. Sunday’s sermon is announced on a billboard identical to the kind for supermarket specials: Believing Is Seeing. A vertical wave of plate glass breaks against it. Behind the polished façades, bouquets of teased cloth, buffed leather, cunning silver trinkets. Pasta to die for. Theology has changed, over the years: just deserts used to be what everyone could expect to get, in the end. Now it’s a restaurant specializing in cakes. All they had to do was abolish guilt, and add an S.
I turn a corner, onto a side street, a double row of expensive boutiques: hand knits and French maternity outfits and ribbon-covered soaps, imported tobaccos, opulent restaurants where the wineglasses are thin-stemmed and they sell you location and overhead. The designer jeans emporium, the Venetian paper knickknack shop, the stocking boutique with its kicking neon leg.