Good to a Fault (25 page)

Coats were dealt out into the proper hands, those who had boots had found them, the music softened and slowed. Trevor was sitting on the bottom stair by the time Clary and Pearce and Mrs. Pell and Dolly worked their way through. Getting them all dressed was easy enough. The hard thing was Paul. Clary put her arms back obediently for him to help her with her coat, but she found it hard to turn around. His hands fitted the coat onto her shoulders and stayed there for a moment—not long enough for anyone else to see.

She might not have been able to look at him at all, but she suddenly remembered and turned to say, “I hate to tell you this, but there’s a bad smell in the living room. I think it’s the loveseat.”

“Oh, good Lord, I just brought it in from the garage.”

“Something died inside there, man,” Darwin said. “I thought it’d better wait till after the party. I’ll help you take it back outside.”

“I can’t—Candy Vincent sat there half the night!”

“Everything else was perfect,” Clary said.

“Everything else?”

She bent her head. “Oh, yes,” she said. She fastened Pearce back into his seat and took his comforting weight in her hand. “Children, we’d better—” She held out her hand to shake Paul’s. Their hands fit together. After a moment, because she had to, Clary let go.

They trooped out into the cold air.

Sparks of stars flew above the rooftops and northern lights were flaring, slashing, bright yellow and green and red flowing into each other. All the people who had left the party were still standing on the sidewalk, looking up, sighing as the curtains swayed.

P
aul stopped at the house on his way to do his hospital visits on Saturday morning. “In case I don’t see you there,” he said, when Clary answered the door. “I thought if I didn’t—I thought I’d stop to see you, just in case. In case you—”

She laughed and asked him to come in, but he could see children in various stages of pyjamas running back and forth, and he said he wouldn’t, “Only I hoped—”

He started again. “I wanted to ask if you could come for dinner tonight, to my house.” He was already halfway down the steps, as if to give her room to refuse.

“Of course,” she said. “Yes!”

He was off. “Six-thirty?” he called back. “Seven?”

“Six-thirty, please,” she said, wondering what she would do about the children.

At six p.m. Mrs. Zenko knocked on the door and stepped inside, calling for Clary.

“Darwin and Fern and I are taking the little ones to the lobster place,” she told Clary. “It’s Seniors’ Saturday and I’ve got a coupon, so we’ll have a party too.”

Clary found their jackets and tied two pairs of shoes and kissed Pearce, and then she went to do her hair and change her own clothes. She tried on the grey wool dress—too severe, cloisterish. She tightened the belt. Took it off. She put on the brown skirt. Without the sash it was plain enough. It was only dinner.

Leaning in the doorway of her room, Darwin said, “He’s a seriously good guy. You know that. Why are you confusing yourself? Get over there.”

She tried a necklace, then took it off. She shouted, “Oh!” and Darwin laughed at her. Nothing, unadorned. That was her. Darwin found her keys.

Paul was watching through the window when Clary got out of her car. Her chestnut-hull jacket, hair in a low braid twisting over the collar. Autumn beech leaves, with a little plain white peeping through the neck. Always a pleasure to look at her. How familiar she was, her legs moving the way he knew, her back straight, her straight gait, and her heavy skirt moving easily through brown and gold. Dressed up for this, but still herself. He opened the door. They stood looking at each other.

“What’s for dinner?” Clary asked.

“Well. I thought—carbonara—I have some good pancetta.”

Paul backed into the living room, giving her the room, empty as it was. No pungent sofa, at least; the church-hall chairs returned and the floor bare wood, this time, Murphy-soaped. His mother’s Jacobean crewel-work curtains vacuumed to banish the lonely settled dust. Clary’s clothes looked beautiful in there. Clary did.

She was carrying a bottle of wine. He had bought wine glasses and some pretty good wine himself. He was competent. It was only spaghetti, he told himself. Even if it curdled, it would taste good. He talked about Italy while they grated cheese and broke eggs. He had not known that she’d lived in England, with her mother’s cousins. They compared notes on the plummy voices, the quaintness of the packaging, the beauty. He had done graduate work at Cambridge after U of T, cold and hungry all the time. His mother still lived in Toronto. His sister Binnie had died, she knew that. No other family to rush to his side.

“My mother would, gladly. But it would only make everything harder. She and Lisanne never—could not—” He stopped. No need for this fumbling.

“My mother hated Dominic,” Clary said. “That made it easier, because I didn’t have to justify anything to her—being left. She never sullied our ears with his name again.”

Paul hated to hear the flat note in her voice when she spoke of her once-husband. He consciously brightened his own voice, saying, “What we look for first is someone as unlike our parents as possible—we did a good job on that, both of us. Congratulations!”

He lifted his glass, but caught its base somehow on the wooden salad forks and spilled red wine into the greens waiting in the bowl.

“Never mind,” Clary said, dabbing at them with a paper towel. “It’ll be a vintner’s salad. Take the edge off the vinegar.”

As she did. Paul turned away to light the stove, quickly, in case he might touch her.
While up from my heart’s root / So great a sweetness flows I shake from head to foot
.

The carbonara was the best he’d ever made. He was flushed with achievement, or with wine, didn’t matter. Able to talk freely, to hold forth to someone who didn’t look puzzled by his train of thought or ask what some word meant, who laughed when he made a mild joke. She might even have laughed at his marrying-Xanthippe epiphany, he thought.
Xanthippany
.

He steered his thoughts away from Lisanne, but too late. She was present enough at the table, sneering at his attempts to be engaging.

He fell silent. Clary, too, seemed to run out of talk, or the need to talk. She smiled at him. He understood that her kindness would not let her be stiff or seem uncomfortable. Her perfect courtesy, her upbringing. Or maybe, he told himself, she was not uncomfortable. Not conscious, as he was.

There was a pint of fancy ice cream, frozen impermeable. He left it on the kitchen counter to soften, and found the old coffee grinder which Lisanne’s sister had scorned.

While Paul made coffee, Clary went upstairs to find the bathroom.

She had drunk a lot of wine, not too much. A little too much. The bathroom, straight ahead. Where she had changed Pearce, at the party, and he had said
Clah!
Perfect boy. She looked into the other doors, stepping lightly
on the bare floors so Paul would not hear her snooping. A shelf-lined study, the desk not as untidy as his office desk; a little room with a daybed and a bookcase; then his bedroom, which had been his and Lisanne’s. A big pine bed, a dresser, nothing else. No night tables, so the bed stood bare against the wall. An ironing board set up in one corner for him to iron his clerical shirts. She must be drunk, she was getting sad.

Back to the bathroom, that white empty shell. No shower curtain—Lisanne must have taken it, of course. It felt strange to be alone in Paul’s house with him, as if his house was an extension of his body. She was so bad at this! What was this, even?

She splashed water on her face, then remembered that she had worn mascara. She carefully tissued off the raccoon eyes, and was left clean but no longer sultry. As she should not be. Ridiculous to try to be attractive, she was too old and he was too broken, never mind his sweet mouth and the pale, strained skin at his temples.

No time for this, much as they might want it. Far too early for him, and unfortunately too late for her, as she could see in the mirror in that all-white bathroom. With any luck she had not made a complete fool of herself, and could gracefully say good night and go home to the children. She drank a palmful of water, then buried her face in the full white towel. At least his towels were new and rich-feeling, so he had one kindly, soft thing in his life. Her face was old, no matter how she turned her chin to look. She switched off the harsh light and opened the door.

Paul was standing in the hall. “I came to find you,” he said.

“Here I am,” she said. His face was so bare, it took up her whole field of vision. Open. Looking at her completely—who else saw her?

She was old. She was who she was.

“Your face is beautiful,” he said, needing to tell her that, at least. The light of hidden flowers. Her head was bent, looking down at her feet beneath the edge of the brown skirt. Where it curved, there it was golden, and then dark brown in the shadows.

“This is impossible, isn’t it,” he said. To let her leave.

Neruda, that was:
I love you as the plant that never blooms, but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers.
But that was between a husband and wife, together for twenty-five years. Why would he think that of Clary, whom he
hardly knew, had known hardly any time at all? Who he knew as if she was himself, who seemed to fit and match him everywhere. Clary looked into his eyes, and walked through the doorway, three steps, and was in his room.

“I bought a new bed.”

“I’m glad it’s new,” she said, and they sat down together on the edge of it, in the pale, empty room. After a minute he knelt down and took her shoes off.

As they made love Clary thought of lines she had not believed, of images in art. She saw a rose window, and understood, in some translation of spirit, why cathedrals had them—that arching, redoubling, million-faceted rose-wide opening, that springing, flooding light. The reason of the rose, in the first place.

They lay silent, Paul’s arm bent around her shoulder and collar-bone, his other arm beneath her. No need to move yet.

He said, “
Where
I
does not exist, nor
you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.”

But she could not fall asleep, because there were children at home. After what seemed like a long time, she got up and dressed in the darkness. She knelt beside the bed and folded her hand over his. His fingers twitched, lightly.

She went home. Past midnight, but Mrs. Zenko waved a gay hand from the couch, saying, “Darwin took Fern off to some party, some old friend she wanted to see, you just missed them. Well, my sweet, I’ll say good night. You look like you had a lovely evening.”

Mrs. Zenko gathered up her jacket and her purse. She squeezed Clary’s arm as she went out, and kissed her on the cheek. “Sleep well.”

Clary dreamed that Lorraine came to her room and sat on her bed and asked for a report on the children. She began obediently with Pearce: gaining weight nicely, walking all the time, frustrated now if he was left in his playpen. She did not say that Pearce knew her name. Trevor: happy enough, a few friends he talked about, seemed to be doing well as long as they kept at the homework; she vowed to do better with printing practice, she promised faithfully.

Dolly?
Lorraine asked, her shadowy shape bending slightly.

I have no idea, Clary had to say. I have no idea how she is doing. I have been too busy with my own affairs. Tears tracked down Lorraine’s ghost cheek, shining in the beam of the streetlight outside.

Clary climbed up out of sleep and checked on Pearce; then she went down the hall to the children’s room. Trevor was breathing loudly in the top bunk. He muttered and then sighed, still in his dream. Dolly’s duvet had slipped off, and Clary straightened it, looking at the tangle of thin arms and legs, the wild hair straying on the pillow. She could not be in love, she had children to look after.

At five in the morning Paul came down and found chocolate ice cream melted all over the kitchen counter. He whistled while he cleaned it up, even though it was before breakfast.

F
ern called Clary at 6 a.m., too scared to wait longer. She and Darwin had run into a little mayhem at the party, a fight had erupted; it was unclear. He had a broken nose, they thought, and concussion; he was still unconscious and they weren’t sure how bad it was. Darwin had not been fighting, Fern said, he’d been
in
the fight, but not—it was hard to understand her. Clary went to Emergency right away.

Fern could not stop crying. “It was all pushing, coats and fists, and then he fell! There was ice—”

But where had they been? When Clary asked, Fern just shook her head and wept some more. “It’s all my fault, I shouldn’t have taken him there—everybody was wasted and—my friend—was mad and he wanted a fight, he was being an asshole. Darwin wouldn’t fight with him, he said he was too drunk to fight with, but he was swinging anyway, and the others, and then Darwin turned away and got dropped, his fist caught his nose, crack! And he went down backwards. It was all ice out there, they’d thrown Jack out, I was worried that he might get hurt because he was with these…They were all so drunk, and then the police came…”

Clary could not untangle the hes and hims but gathered, mostly from
Fern’s woe, that Darwin was blameless and unlucky. Fern seemed not to be drunk, but having a hard time getting herself back under control. Clary stood with an arm around her while she got it all out.

“He sat up and his nose was bleeding and smashed, and I said, I think you’ve broken your nose, and he said, It’s all right, it’s been broken before—and then he passed out.”

Fern was too old to be this young, Clary thought. She must have seen fights out in Davina. And Darwin was an idiot to have milled in there.

He looked stricken, flat in the narrow bed, the energy that usually zinged around him gone dead. A huge scrape on the side of his cheek was cleaned, but still oozing blood. His nose was a swollen mess packed with gauze. In a while she’d go up and tell Lorraine, when they knew what was happening.

They had not used any birth control—why think of that now? She had lost the knack of all this: how long of nobody, nothing, only the crumbs from under thy table.

Clary got home at noon to find Moreland parking outside. Tears sprang into her eyes at the sight of his competent bulk. “Not enough sleep last night,” she said, hugging him. Remembering why she hadn’t slept enough, she turned her face so Moreland wouldn’t see that joy sparking through her. He’d think she was hiding tears for Darwin, but that was not dishonest.

“Is he bad?”

“He looks terrible! But he’s awake, and they’ve packed his nose.”

“Well, I’m on a mission to calm Fern down. I forgot, Grace sent—” He opened the passenger door and slid out a large cardboard box. “Plug in the slow cooker right away for the barbecue beef, five hours, she said, and there’s three dozen buns for the freezer and two squares and that other pot is beans, and beet pickles and a bunch of new tea-towels.”

Moreland hopped into his truck. Clary took the box—Grace in cardboard—and struggled with it up to the porch. Mrs. Zenko opened the screen and helped her manoeuvre it through the door. “No trouble here, I just popped over, busybody that I am,” Mrs. Zenko said. Mrs. Pell was snoring on the chesterfield, but the children were still watching TV in what seemed to be a contented stupor.

While she was plugging in Grace’s slow cooker, Paul walked up the front steps. Clary could hear his feet stamping off the night’s dusting of snow, and knew it was him. He must be on his way home after church—she could tell him about Darwin. He opened the door without knocking, which made her happy, and came straight into the kitchen. She turned to look at him, now in some way her own.

He walked across the shining tiles with his boots still on and put his arms around her. He said, “I forgot to say, but you must know: I love you.”

Maybe it only seemed unreal because she was not used to it. Trevor had to tell Paul about the movie they’d been watching. He slid his chair against Paul’s, and Dolly came to find out what she was missing. Pearce in his high chair growled comments. Paul was enjoying them all.

Clary had a dizzy sensation of artificiality.
True/False.
We are a little family. That was not a thought that was allowed. It is true, she insisted. But her other mind yelled
False
, and that was true too.

She was not hungry. She put soup in front of Dolly, and some for Trevor; ladling, turning, but seeing Lorraine with the delicate oxygen tubes trailing over her ears and into her nose, and Darwin caught in the hospital’s web too, and Clayton, all of them, disappearing.

The verdict was simply a bad concussion from the fall, the impact of the sidewalk on the back of Darwin’s head. Paul sat on the end of his bed, like Darwin sat on the end of Lorraine’s, and disliked it. He did not want to be Darwin for Darwin. I’m not up to it, he thought. Who did he care for like Darwin cared for Lorraine? Binnie, he told himself, but that was only partly true; he’d gone when he thought he could, for two weeks here and there. He had allowed his job and his marriage to rule his time, as if either one mattered. Darwin had simply left whatever his real life was and come.

“I’ll sit with Lorraine tonight,” he told Darwin, who shut his eyes. Paul warmed Darwin’s ankle through the sheet, as he had seen Darwin doing a thousand times to Lorraine’s, and was rewarded with a creeping smile.

“You’re a model patient,” Paul said. “Patience on a monument.” It took him a moment to remember where that was from: Viola promising endless devotion to her secret love, wasn’t it? A flash of elation darted through him at
the thought of the loved one, the electric linkage of
love—loved one—Clary
, all complete and coursing with current. He put on his coat, and with it, her smell. He took it off again, and put it on—there it was. She was in his coat, his hands, in his skin.

Closing the coat around him, Paul went down two floors to sit with Lorraine.

The change in her was frightening. She was horribly thin. Her colour was strange, and the nurse said that as engraftment took hold she slept most of the time, but fitfully, waking prone to panic. Understandably. Paul settled himself in the blue chair to wait for her to waken.

“I slept with Clary last night,” he imagined telling her, the one safe person he could tell. He was grateful to be so rationally smitten with Clary, not to have to consider any possibility that this was revenge on Lisanne.

Clary, the most beautiful—the broad map of her brow—who would have thought he could fall so Victorianly in love with a forehead? He loved her lovely face, her small strong hands; he loved the gentle decrease of her ribs, cello-shape on her side in his new bed. He remembered—he could see—the new map of blue veins on her breasts, the unfamiliar clasp of her body around him. His mind’s eye turned backwards to look at Lisanne’s sharp, angry body, and back farther, to when she could lie quietly beside him, their legs twined together, yielding to each other’s spirit. He found that tears were pouring out of his eyes as he thought of her.

In all this time, his whole life, he had only made love with Lisanne, and against all his wishes he could hardly bear that Clary had not been her last night. That she was going to the Mayan Riviera to be entered, entered, and everything that was holy was profane.

He constrained himself before he broke into sobs. This was not even real, and it was ungrateful. Clary was infinitely worth loving, infinitely kind, entirely herself. He pushed back on the turquoise leatherette to recline, determined to meditate, and fell asleep beside Lorraine.

Self-righteous about their need to know, Mrs. Pell had told the children that Darwin was hurt. Now they would have to be taken for a visit after supper. It would probably do them good to see Lorraine, too, even in her present state.
But in fact, Clary wanted to leave the children safe with Mrs. Zenko and drive to Paul’s house, and never go to that charnelhouse hospital again. Her mother’s had been an awful, staggering death, everything about her ravaged and ruined, all her beauty gone. Her father, eighteen years earlier, had died more beautiful than before, pared to bone and sinew, made clearer, his soul visible. Her mother had drained away in despair until only the husk was left and the poor husk suffered longer. Which would Lorraine be?

She could wonder that in comfort, while at the same time the smell of Paul rose from her hands, her clothes, clouded around her and made her beautiful. For a bitter moment she hated her own health and luck, and everything else that made her different from Lorraine.

Dolly could not eat her supper. Too bad, because she loved Grace’s beans. She was afraid to see Darwin if he looked bad too. She wanted to cry or hit Trevor but she tried to distract herself from that, since it would only lead to more badness. But he was stupid, and Pearce was gross, smearing beans on his face. They should not let him eat by himself if he was too young for it. Disgusting.

She pushed her chair back from the table quickly and ran down the hall to the bathroom because she was going to throw up. She shut the door tight so nobody would come in there, and leaned over the toilet. There was spit coming up in her mouth. She spit, but she didn’t let herself throw up. She wiped her mouth and looked at herself in the big clean wall of mirror: eyes sloped-down at the corners, flat brown hair, crooked teeth hidden because she was keeping her mouth shut. She looked sad. The hospital made her neck feel tight, but you could not tell anybody you did not want to see your poor skinny mother. Dolly grabbed the big towel off the rack and buried her face in it and screamed as loudly as she could. It made no noise at all. Then she went to get
Vanity Fair,
to have something to read if her mom was sleeping.

Down the hospital halls Trevor tapped his knuckles on Pearce’s car seat over and over in a certain rhythm until Clary asked him not to because Pearce was sleeping. So he touched his thumb to the wall, then his baby finger, then his thumb, then his baby finger, in exactly the right order. But what about Darwin? As he walked he did his toes for Darwin, left big toe, right little toe, right big toe, left little toe.

When they got there, Darwin was fast asleep and Fern said the nurses wouldn’t let them into the room. She promised he was okay and Trevor had to believe her. But he kept on ticking while they all went upstairs and into the special washroom to wash and mask, to see his mom. He got to be first this time.

Dolly couldn’t stand to stick around and wait for her turn. Too many bodies in this little washroom. She slid backwards without anyone noticing. Maybe she’d go back to the third floor and check on Darwin again; she could sneak past that nurse. She took the right turns, and it wasn’t like she didn’t know the hospital, but she found herself in a dark dead end anyway. This was wrong. Through a passage by the staff elevators she could see lit rooms.

She ran on quiet feet, turned sharply left, and almost bumped into a stretcher lying against the wall. Or into the feet stretching off it, wrapped with a sheet. At first she thought it was a dead person but when she got to the head it was not covered, so he must be still alive. It was her Keys Books man. Just left there in the hall like a piece of machinery.

His nose pointed up to the ceiling. His closed eyes were sunken in around the eyeballs but the bony parts stood out, and his flaring white eyebrows like antennae. Except that he was so long, everything else about him had shrunk down flat.

Nurses were far away, busy. It was almost the end of visiting, and the night things were happening in the rooms: people’s friends being hustled out, their medicine bags being changed.

Dolly stood by the Keys Books man for a minute. She wanted to touch his eyelids, smooth them the way her dad liked her to do, but she was scared he would wake up and bite her fingers off.

“I’m almost through my book the second time,” she said. She showed it to his closed eyes. “
Vanity Fair.
You gave it to me.”

He didn’t even have a room to be in. He was probably dying, that’s why.

They all were. Her mom, and the old guy, and now Darwin. And she herself was dying, shrivelling in her own body, already. Everybody, everybody, every body dies.

So it’s not so bad, it’s not unfair. She left him and went away down the hall to see if she could find Darwin’s room before she’d have to go back and wash up for her mom.

Trevor saw that Paul was in their mom’s room—sound asleep in the blue leaner chair. Their mom was asleep too, it was quiet and shadowy in there. Clary went and put her hand on Paul’s cheek to wake him up, the way she woke Trevor in the mornings. Paul opened his eyes and saw where he was, and looked up at Clary and smiled, his stiff face creasing. He was okay. Trevor had thought maybe Paul was sick too. Paul put his hand up and touched Clary’s cheek that same way, and then he looked across and waved at Trevor and Fern. The pink nurse grumbled and swished her tight pants right by Trevor’s nose, going to check the bag on the big pole. Flick, flick, her finger jigged the lines, and then she leaned over and said, “Lorraine! Lorraine! You’ve got some visitors here.” Her voice sounded crisp and slightly mean, but she was busy. Trevor didn’t hate her, the way he did the short-haired one.

His mother dragged her eyes open and saw him, before anybody else. She held out her arms and he went in close, squeezed between the i.v. pole and the bed. It hurt a bit but not too much, and his mother’s soft thin face was close. He could not remember the last time he’d been able to talk to her all by herself. He could not think of anything to say.

“Hey, Trevor,” she said, taking the worry away from him. “I’m so happy it’s you. I miss you so much! Is Clary taking good care of you?” He nodded. “Are you okay?”

The others were outside the door, they couldn’t hear.

“I’m just tired,” she said. “I love you, baby.”

He stared at her face.

“After you’re gone from sight, and can’t be seen, or be with us, will you still love me?” Trying to get at the idea of dead without saying the word of dead.