Alone in the Classroom (24 page)

I was very aware of his voice. He sounded his age. He sounded like a retired businessman accustomed to giving orders to the workmen outside. He was inviting me to visit, to bring my children to his place on the river, and my husband, too, if he was interested.

His property on the Gatineau wasn’t far away from the farm he had rented for a long time. But this was his own - the remnants of an orchard, the frame house, the long, low log workshop in which he and two assistants made the boats, sleighs, and summer furniture they were known for. The day we went to see him was a Saturday in June. He lent my husband a fishing rod. Then he took the children and me on the river in his rowboat and afterwards gave them the run of an elaborate tree house he had built for his nephews, his sister’s two boys. While they played, we sat on the veranda and he talked about the doubts he had about his business and his insecurities about the future, which ran deep. He didn’t take his eyes off me, reading me, I thought, studying me. When my children bounded over, he gave them ice cream and lemonade.

In the days following, I looked at his phone number several times, thinking I should call to say we had enjoyed our visit, but I didn’t call. I thought about him. I felt a little sorry for him and curious about him and disturbed. Then one day when I was buying milk at the corner store, I stepped into the pay phone and called the number I had apparently memorized. I got a gruff hello, then quite a different tone when he realized who it was. “I wish I could see you alone,” he said, “without all the entourage. It’s not that I have a hidden agenda, but there’s so much I’d like to talk to you about.”

“Why don’t you drop by,” I said. “The next time you happen to be in Ottawa.” And I gave him our address.

“So
there
you are,” my husband said when I came back through the screen door onto the side porch of our house.

The air was balmy, fragrant with rain fallen and still to come. We had our supper on the porch, grilled vegetables and steak. Our skin was smooth from humidity, from swimming in lakes. All summer I would walk barefoot down paths and across docks and up ladders onto rafts. I swam out towards loons and got to within ten feet of them, so absorbed were they in each other’s posturing and aggressiveness - their wingspreads and chest-thrustings and wingbeats and calls. Then they went at it beak to beak. Three birds, and one of them an intruder.

I noticed my husband’s handshake when Michael dropped by, assessing, deliberate.

He phoned every few days and I sat in a chair to listen and talk.

“I remember when you came up behind me and put your hand on my back,” he said. “You came to say goodbye, and I felt this warm current run through me. Do you remember that?”

I remembered vaguely.

“At the party,” he said. “But you’re very tactile. I didn’t know what to think. What to do with this strong attraction.” He paused. “You don’t have to say anything.”

And so it went, lighting different parts of the fire, a fold of paper here, a bit of birchbark there.

“Your husband shouldn’t mind if somebody else loves you. He should be flattered. But I don’t want to make things difficult for you,” he said.

I bought the big Saturday edition of the newspaper in the corner store and carried it home, the weight of it cradled in my arm, and as I turned into the back lane I flipped the sections with my free hand and the old whiff I had never thought to smell again came into my face. Newspapers of old smelled damp, inky, pungent. We would lie on the floor when we were kids, our noses inches above the paper, and devour the comic strips that were so glamorous in those days, the women and the men bewitching, all chiselled cheekbones and thick hair, full lips and swelling breasts. The damp wonder of sex and romance, and the excitement of the world out there awaiting us - it was all transmitted directly into our noses through newsprint and ink. I caught the smell, papers don’t have it anymore, but I caught it and held the newspaper up to my face. Summer
breezes moved in the trees, water-laden breezes, and at two in the morning I was still awake in the green armchair in the living room, in the angle of light from the street lamp outside, as the thought of him doubled me over at the waist, again and again.

How attraction works, making one’s body almost painfully alive and one’s thoughts concentrated, also painfully. And the truth of these powerful attractions - they have their own morality and nothing else matters.

It wasn’t just the summer air reawakening the smell of newsprint as it used to be, but in my openness I was like a child again, susceptible to everything.

The next time I saw him we went for a walk, and a cat crossed his path and he called out with delight, “Pusser,” and leaned sideways and with complete familiarity stopped it in its tracks by giving it a couple of firm, confident pats to head and back,
“with
the fur.” Then with even greater familiarity, he lifted it by its tail several inches off the ground and set it back down. His happy grin. “It didn’t expect that.” Later, we heard two cats quarrelling in the street, high-pitched toms, and he said it sounds worse than it is. He talked about the puddle of meaning that forms around an animal or a house or a boat or a book. About his liking for straight gin, sitting outside in the late afternoon with a glass of freezer-cold, unadulterated gin. About his awful years in school. About never taking sufficient risks in his life. About his workshop and the range of his work and the prices he charged and the sales he made and how he might make more, and how perhaps one day I might write about him.

He talked and talked, and when it was about real things, no one was more vivid, but whenever he turned philosophical he lost himself in abstractions. On the phone, it was different. Those moments opened wide. Do you remember putting your hand on my back when you said goodbye? And my own speechlessness.

After seeing him, I would think, Now it won’t be hard. I can put him out of my mind. A day or two would pass, and once again the pressure would build, until either I called him or he called me, and then I would be out of my head with happiness. What could be wrong about feeling so alive? I came to see that what was easiest of all was throwing everything away. The husband disappears, and the absence of guilt (of feeling for him) is startling.

One morning when the kids were at camp, I went outside and sat in the car in the driveway. It was warm there behind the wheel, and I rolled down the window. The dashboard was dusty. The whole car, in fact, needed a good vacuuming. I turned the key in the ignition and at first I drove in subdued and fleeting sunshine, but soon it turned to rain and the rain was steady. A grader was out and I had to pull onto another road to let it go by. A glimpse of river on the right, then it disappeared from view and reappeared closer to the road. I turned into Michael’s driveway and parked, and walked from the car into his kitchen, and for an hour or two we talked, keeping a safe, if charged, distance between us. As usual, he was talkative about himself, but also nervous, as nervous as I was, but his way of showing it was to fall into the exaggerated face-pulling that uneasy boys engage in. His voice was casual, a big voice that was light on its feet. I
stood up from the table to leave and he stood up, too, and in that moment, to my surprise, since I didn’t think it was ever going to happen, we stepped together and he put his arms around me. “You’re lovely,” he said. I kissed him on the corner of his mouth. Rain outside the window, soft dribbling off the eaves. We kissed again and the bucket inside me turned over and emptied its contents with a swoosh. “I want to lick you all over,” he said.

The hours on the road to Maine helped, and the direction I was going helped too, away from Michael. I had no plan. I just wanted, innocently, or not innocently at all, to spend a couple of days with Connie. It was a safe way of being close to him. I wasn’t sure what I would tell her.

Once she realized who I was talking about, she stopped asking questions about the need in me. We went for a walk on the dirt road, past the yellowing raspberry bushes and down to the sailboats, one of which was hers. She promised to take me out the next day, but my husband was a fanatical sailor, with three sailboats, and I had had enough of sailing. We didn’t speak for some time and the air between us grew more and more awkward.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” I said.

“You’ve made me feel old, Annie. Old and jealous.”

I reached for her arm and we stopped and faced each other. I said, “It’s you he loves. He said I remind him of you.”

She shook that off with a smile. “I don’t blame you. I blame him a little. But why should I blame him? He’s never been the only man in my life.”

“But he’s always been important.”

“Yes.” She looked away and was silent for a moment. “I don’t know.” And she shrugged. “That’s life. People fall for each other. It’s not hard to understand. Not hard at all.”

She took my hand and we walked on until we came to a rocky high point with a view of the sea and the sunset. There was a weathered picnic table on the edge of the point, and we sat side by side facing the water. The air was sweet with wildflowers and the smell of the sea, and the sunset filled the sky from top to bottom with pink. Then Connie led the way back to her house, and in talking about herself and Michael he came alive again in a new way, stronger than ever. She said that all of her teaching flowed from having tried to teach him how to read. (Her school in Boston specialized in dyslexia, a word she learned after the war.) And one of the things she had come to appreciate was ego. Michael wasn’t the only one who was self-involved to a maddening degree. “When words avoid you, or continually cross you up, you have no escape from yourself.”

In her kitchen she opened a bottle of wine and we cooked a late supper. She seemed to be almost amused in that weary way we have of being entertained by the unforeseeable workings of the world. “He’s had a lot of darkness in his life,” she said.

“Yes.”

“But light too. Lots of light.” Her face became very expressive. She knew him through and through. “He’s had to struggle so hard. He grew up believing he was stupid and he learned to keep going despite that. He throws himself at things.”

I listened to her talk. She said he knew how to enchant, but running under the surface charm was touchiness, especially about being patronized. She smiled a little, and what she said next sounded less critical than affectionate. “He’s so egocentric. But thoughtful. And, of course, he’s one of the best-looking men around. But I couldn’t spend even a month with him.”

She was treating me as an equal fetched up on the rocky shores of foolishness.

“Tell me why.”

“He’s too solitary. Too frugal. Too cheap for me.” Her familiar laugh pealed out the screen windows and across the garden and possibly down to the shore. “Your parents have a good marriage, Anne.”

“My father is solitary and my mother is cheap.”

“Your mother is loyal.”

“My mother is solitary, too.”

“That’s the artist in her. I envy that. She’s made herself into a serious artist.”

These words soothed me, and I had to wipe my eyes.

Many hours later, we were eating blueberry pie fresh out of the oven and watching for first light. I heard tires on the gravel road and then footsteps went by, a boy delivering newspapers. Connie was telling me that the beginning with Michael was very subtle and secretive, and went on to be very conspicuous. Syd saw it all happening, and it had happened to him before, that’s what made it so cruel. But he was always there when she came back from seeing Michael, he was always affectionate. After Michael enlisted, they didn’t see him for several months. Then one
night he dropped by in uniform and the three of them sat in the kitchen as they had in the past. “And suddenly I was the least important part of the triangle. They spent the time talking to each other. To hell with this, I thought, and I went to bed.” Michael would tell her later that he had asked Syd to say goodbye for him. But Syd, of course, had said nothing. He didn’t hide from her, however, the address Michael had written on a piece of paper and left on the table. He was at the Manning Depot in the Coliseum at the C.N.E. grounds in Toronto. AC Graves Michael.

“What became of Syd?” I asked.

She went to one of her many bookshelves and pulled down his eight books, including the history Michael had illustrated, and his skilful drawings gave me a stab of pleasure. The books included two volumes in a series for schools,
World History Made Simple
and
World Literature Made Simple
. I opened one and read the first sentence. “Much of history is the story of what
probably
happened in the remote and more recent past.” And I looked away from those words and proceeded to tell Connie the rest of what had happened so recently between Michael and me.

He had called me in the morning after my husband left for work (this was the morning after I had driven to his house in the rain and stayed all day) to ask me how I was. I said I hadn’t slept. He hadn’t either. Then he got me laughing by telling me about an old hippie rogue he knew who gave an eighty-year-old woman a joint, which alleviated all her pain, but then her family arrived and they were mortified. And the old hippie said, “Don’t worry. I’ll talk Mrs. Drysdale down.” He would talk me down, he
said. And quite gently he told me that I would be scorned by everybody who knew me if I got involved with him at the expense of my marriage. “Call it old-school decency,” he said.

I looked over at Connie as I told her this.

“I know,” she said, understanding my predicament. “I know.”

“What do you know?”

“He’s going to break your heart.”