A Jest of God (14 page)

As we enter the front room, he laughs.

“Seems funny, doesn’t it? Waiting until the family is out. Like reverting to adolescence.”

The room has an almost untouched look, the neatness of a livingroom in a house where people congregate always in the kitchen. The furniture is old and ornate, pieces gathered with loving frugality, perhaps, throughout a quarter-century of auction sales. A walnut sideboard with a high bevelled mirror, a china cabinet plumed and scrolled woodenly and filled with objects hardly discernible behind the ruby glass. A plum-coloured chesterfield made for some giant race, curved hugely into the bow of the bay window. Then, in the midst of these known shapes, a gilt-bordered ikon, and an embroidered tablecloth with some mythical tree nestled in by a fantasy of birds, and on the wall a framed photograph of long-dead relatives in the old country, the heavily moustached men sitting with hands on knees, wearing their serge suits and rigid smiles, the women aproned elaborately and wearing on their heads black-fringed
babushkas
patterned with poppies or roses.

“Like a drink, Rachel?”

“Yes, all right.”

Now, in his own house, he seems for the first time reticent, or at a loss for words. Or else he thinks – words afterwards. How can I tell?

But when we are in his room, I can’t tell him what has been on my mind, what’s worrying me. It’s his concern, too. I know that. But will he know it? I have to speak of it. I promised myself I would. It’s essential. But I can’t bring up the
subject at all. It crosses my mind that I don’t know him well enough. That’s ridiculous, of course.

“What’s the matter, Rachel?”

“Nothing. Nothing’s the matter. I feel better, actually, here in this place.”

“How – better?”

“Safer.”

He laughs. “Because of its four walls and a roof?”

“You think that’s foolish, don’t you?”

“Yeh, maybe. But women don’t.”

Women. I’m not the only one, then, who feels that way. Nick goes to the windows and opens the curtains.

“My mother always closes them,” he says, “to keep out the sun. It gives me claustrophobia, having a place shut up like this.”

Then he puts his arms around me.

“Come on, darling, come and lie down beside me.”

There seems to be a kind of tenderness in his voice. After a while I won’t feel apprehensive any more. I can even take off my clothes without feeling very unfamiliar about it. See – I have changed.

His hands are careful and gentle and slow at first.

“You have nice small breasts, darling. You’re very slender all over, aren’t you?”

“I’m too thin.” Then I’m sorry I said that.

“No. I like it.”

“Do you?”

“Yes. I like you here, and here. Very delicate shoulders, too, you have. And beautiful thighs, and the skin there is – feel how soft your own skin is, Rachel, when I stroke you there?”

Am I like that? I never knew.

“You touch me, too,” he says. “There. Put your hands there. That’s good. More.”

Then I want my hands to know everything about him, the way the hair grows in his armpits, the curve of his bones at the hips, the tight muscles of his belly, the arching of his sex.

“Now, Rachel?”

“Yes. Now.” If only I can relax. Relax, Rachel.

“Relax, Rachel.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No – it’s all right. Just relax, darling.”

“I’m sorry – Nick –”

“It’s all right.”

But it isn’t. Without wanting to, I’m holding myself away. But it hasn’t hurt after all. Now there is only the swiftness of him, the heaviness of him on me, and at the final moment he does not cry out like before, but his face is so intense I can hardly look upon it, for the open tenderness I feel, seeing him so. Then it is over, and after a while he lifts his head and looks at me. With my fingers I go over the sharp outlines of his face, and touch his eyes and the unruly blackness of his hair.

“Nick –”

“Hello. Was that – I mean, did you, Rachel?”

“Yes.” This is not true, but it is true in every way that is important to me now.

Thought has to return, but it hasn’t the power to threaten me, not yet.
What if?
I should be concerned. And yet the knowledge that he will somehow inhabit me, be present in me, for a few days more – this, crazily, gives me warmth, against all reason. After that, though, I’ll know definitely I’m once more alone in myself. I cannot really believe I could have
a child, that it would be possible. Yet Stacey told me once she never believed it for the whole nine months, with the first one, and only knew it was really true when the child was there to be seen.

Nick lights cigarettes for us both and lies beside me with his head on my breasts, and we are lazy and do not have to get up yet, and through the window I can see the grey light of the evening.

“I could at least make some coffee for you,” he says at last. “I’m a hell of a host.”

Host. It seems an unusual word, under the circumstances.

We dress and go back down to the living room, and when the coffee is ready we sit together within the mammoth half-moon chesterfield.

Now I can’t think of anything to say. He talks so easily, when he wants, yet he does not seem bothered by silences. I’m the opposite.

“There’s no samovar.”

“What?”

“They have an ikon, your parents, but no samovar.”

As I’m speaking, I can feel how uncalled-for a comment it is. Not everyone who came from that part of the world would arrive complete with a samovar, for heaven’s sake. Now I would give anything not to have spoken.

“What a disappointment,” Nick says. He is laughing, but only just. “Well, to tell you the truth, my grandma started out with a samovar, but she never got it as far as this.”

“Why not?” How relieved I am, that he is doing the talking now. I’m interested, and yet it is the sound of his voice I like best, just to sit here beside him, in this security and hear his voice, whatever it happens to be saying.

“She traded it to somebody on the boat, and no one
knows what she got for it. She used to claim it went for medicine for my dad, but he says he was the only one of all the steerage passengers who wasn’t sick. Personally, I think it probably went for vodka to make the trip endurable. Naturally, she wouldn’t say. But nobody would’ve blamed her.”

“They must have been terrible, the immigrant ships.”

“They were. My dad still talks about it sometimes. He can’t help it. It was the great traumatic experience, the new life beginning in a reeking hold with everybody retching all over everybody else, and cockroaches the size of bats, if he is to be believed. I used to get annoyed at him for talking so much about it. I was a relatively clueless kid in some ways. You can imagine, though – having to sit attentively while you heard the details for the millionth time. Well, maybe you can’t imagine. I guess immigrant ships would be a little bit out of your line.”

For some reason this angers me, although it’s quite true. With my father, it was the Great War, but he didn’t speak of it.

“My grandfather came over on an immigrant ship, as a boy. Perhaps he used to tell my father. Or maybe he didn’t – I don’t suppose that would have been his way. None of it filtered down to me. So then I forget, and feel apologetic towards people like your family, that they went through all that. But so did mine – only it was longer ago, and the memory’s gone now.”

“How odd you are, Rachel. Why should you feel apologetic?”

“I don’t know.” And yet it was he who made me feel like that, saying it would be out of my line, as though things had been easy for the people I came from, easy back into pre history and forward forever. What does he know about it?

“It was a funny thing about that trip, you know,” he is saying. “I guess all the ships were the same. Lots of the people
who’d come over on the same boat kept in touch with one another for years and years afterwards. When I went to Winnipeg to college, my grandma said I had to look up a family that she and my dad had come over with. She used to hear from the Podiuks every Easter and Christmas, and my dad saw them occasionally when he went to the city, but she never went so she never saw them. Such good people, she says. My dad is translating all this for me, sternly, so I’ll get the full picture. Fine people, she says, the best. All she knows of them is holding Mrs. Podiuk’s head, or Mrs. Podiuk holding hers, while the old tub wallowed, but never mind – the voyage makes them kin for ever. Of course, quite right – so it did, but I didn’t see that then. They’ll welcome the boy, she tells my dad – he’ll be like their own son to them. This prospect didn’t exactly fill me with delight. I didn’t know the Podiuks from Adam, and I didn’t want to. But the first week in Winnipeg, off I went – seventeen, you know, and with this strangely faulty sense of direction – I was always getting on the wrong streetcar and ending up at the opposite side of the city from where I’d intended to go. I finally found the place, a little brown stucco house on Selkirk Avenue, and here were all these thousands of young kids mobbing around the front door. Somehow the sight of them stopped me and I just stood there staring until they got really suspicious and started yelling “Whaddya want, mister?” What I wanted was to get the hell out. It seemed crazy to be looking someone up just because your grandmother had come over on the same boat. I asked them where Mr. and Mrs. Podiuk were, and they said – all together, you know, like a Greek chorus, this gruesome chanting –
Dead, dead, dead.
I didn’t wait to see if the next generation of Podiuks was in residence. I just beat it. All I could think was how relieved I was. I was actually relieved they were dead, so I didn’t have to see them. You know?”

He’s easy to laugh with. Then I see that his eyes have changed, and even though he’s still laughing, he’s watching me.

“I talk too much,” he says. “You should interrupt me. Do you like teaching, Rachel?”

He has asked only out of politeness. I wish he hadn’t. I’d rather listen to him talking. There isn’t much to say about myself, nothing that can be spoken. And yet, now when he puts his head down on my lap and props his long legs over the chesterfield’s rim, I feel as though I might talk to him and he would know what I meant.

“I like it – yes, but there’s something about it I can’t get used to.”

“How do you mean?”

“Maybe it doesn’t affect you. Your classes are older, and when they move on, they soon move right away and you don’t see them any more. But mine are only seven, and I see them around for years after they’ve left me, but I don’t have anything to do with them. There’s nothing lasting. They move on, and that’s that. It’s such a brief thing. I know them only a year, and then I see them changing but I don’t know them any more.”

His face looks momentarily troubled. I shouldn’t have said all that. What will he think?

“You get pretty attached to them, I guess, Rachel?”

“Oh – well, I realize one isn’t supposed to, and of course I don’t with all of them, but there are some you can’t help liking better than others, and then you feel – I don’t know – it seems kind of futile.”

I saw James on the street a few days ago. I was thinking of Nick at the time, so I could almost not mind when James zoomed past me without seeing me. Why should he see me? By the time he has finished grade school he’ll have had eight
teachers. He can hardly be expected to take much notice of that number, for evermore.

Nick frowns, looking at me now.

“It isn’t a very good situation for you, Rachel.” Then, unexpectedly, he jumps to his feet. “I think there’s a little rye left – have some?”

“All right. I – I didn’t really mean anything much by what I said about the kids, Nick. You must’ve thought it sounded peculiar.”

“No,” he says. “I didn’t think it sounded peculiar at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

But he wants to change the subject. He brings our drinks, and then goes rambling around looking for cigarettes.

“Jago always keeps an extra packet stashed away somewhere.”

“Where is he tonight, Jago?” The thought has just hit me, and all at once I expect to see him walk in right now. What would it matter if he did? And yet, because I’ve been to bed with Nick, it seems to me I’d show it. I’d betray everything in my face or by some slipped and askew phrase. But what would Jago care? It’s none of his business. Yet if there were something in his face, some suggestion of the situation being furtive, I couldn’t bear that. There’s nothing furtive about it. I don’t care who knows. I do, though. That’s the trouble. If it’s concealed and surreptitious, it’s I who make it so.

“He’s at the movies,” Nick says, glancing at me, and then I see I must have spoken with much more alarm than I meant to. “You worry too much – you know that?”

“I know. It’s very silly. But I can’t seem to help it.”

“It’s not exactly silly. But it’s a waste of energy. Look who’s talking.”

“You’re not a worrier.”

“I don’t strike you that way, eh?”

“No. No, you don’t.”

“Well, I never thought I was, either, until I came back here this summer. I don’t worry about anything that anything can be done about, you understand. Only about things I can’t possibly change. That is really a waste of effort. I hadn’t been back here for quite some time, as you know. I used to get them to come to Winnipeg once or twice a year. They always thought it was good of me. Good, hell. I didn’t want to come back here, that was all. They used to hate those visits, although both of them put on this mighty act of having a wonderful time. My dad used to pace around the apartment and nearly die with boredom. I used to take them to movies. Once I made the awful mistake of taking them to a Russian film – that one about the young soldier trying to get home on leave, and everything goes wrong. I guess it was the Ukraine, millions of miles of nothing but wheat fields. My mother sat there bawling her eyes out, and my dad kept making loud comments about how the Reds had ruined his heart’s earth. It was just great.”

“You were embarrassed?”

Nick isn’t looking at me, and again I have the feeling that he’s talking to himself, and yet, obscurely, he reaches out and moves his hand along my arm.