Goya'S Dog (17 page)

She asked at last, “So how do you find it here, these days?”

“Oh,” he began, and his bare right hand burrowed deeper into his coat pocket, straight through the loose stitching of the lining. He held his peace.

“How's your work?”

“It's hard to
get
work.”

“Get it?”

“You have to live off something. You can't eat paint. Actually, you have to buy paint. Frankly the whole subject depresses me.”

She asked what kind of work he'd been looking for and he told her about the meeting with her father and the succession of failures since then. He decided not to mention the letter he'd just posted to Stanley. Talking to her, he felt oddly calm and sane. He hadn't thought of his time in Toronto as of a piece, it had just seemed like one jarring misshapen fragment after another, and he was surprised that, putting it into words, he was making her laugh. It was a different tone than that of his letter to Evelyn; with Darly he was rueful and unusual and self-deprecating and black. He told her about Leo slipping him drinks and the madwoman's staring dog (she knew Mrs. Blackthorn, practically her aunt). It was a way not to answer her question about his “real work,” which had lain in a flooded ditch for longer than he wanted to recall. So as she laughed, he found himself smiling, softly, shrugging himself off a little, keeping to the same half-tones to make her laugh more. But when they stopped, at a streetlight, and she touched his hand to interrupt him, he saw Evelyn's face.

“It's good that you're trying to get commissions,” she said, getting on top of her grin.

“Goya worked in a restaurant,” said Dacres, mostly to himself.

“Yes, when he was fifteen,” Darly replied.

He was astounded.

“In some ways you're quite heroic,” she said gently, and touched away snow from the tip of her nose.

“I'm glad you think so,” he laughed, and added, “though I doubt most people would see it that way, with what's happening in the world.”

Something passed over her features briefly and she set off walking again.

Stupid blockhead idiot: he'd killed their good feeling.

He talked about his money problems again to lift the mood, and said, “It's not the cleverest way, this life I've chosen,” but he felt he'd lost her interest now.

They walked in silence and she seemed to be hanging back. Then he suddenly realized, “This is my neighbourhood.”

“Here?” she said.

They must have walked north, then east along Queen Street. Recognizing the ABC shop, he took them right, gaily, and asked Darly if she would like a coffee. Then as they stood on the corner, a little way down and across the street from the dirty yellow windows of the Lion Grill, a man ran hard past them in the street and disappeared, his cap pumping up and down in his scrunched hand. Then a smaller man scurried up—Janusz, Dacres saw, and stepped out to stop him. Janusz stared back white-eyed, and then veered right and ran into the grill. Darly joined Dacres in the road.

“Who's that?” she asked.

He shrugged, said “Coffee?” and pointed.

Heavy steps, and two men half-ran to them. They were thugs: round-faced, hatless, harsh. “You seen two Polacks come this way? One little, one big?” Spoken between heavy breaths.

“I have, actually,” said Dacres, sensing Darly looking at him.

“Running this way?”

“They went down there,” he pointed. “Down the alley.”

“God help us,” said the fatter one. “Thanks, pal.”

The other, tie and ill-fitting jacket, nodded his head to Darly but she didn't meet his gaze, and they set off again, unwilling.

“You're very welcome,” Dacres said.

There was a chessboard on the counter, next to a folded newspaper. When Leo saw Dacres, and Dacres accompanied, he looked suspicious, and then he laughed. Dacres smirked, feeling like the thief who brings the princess back to the cave (because he is royalty himself, though he doesn't yet know it). He greeted Leo casually as he led Darly to a table near the back. Then he sat and his jacketed elbows collected damp from the tabletop.

Behind him he heard movement, and Janusz crept out of Leo's back room, and walked past them very slowly on tiptoes, still slightly out of breath. Leo shouted animatedly to him in Russian, and laughed horse-fashion. And then looked at Darly and Dacres, the only customers in the restaurant. He said something very long and fluid, full of consonants, that sounded sarcastic. Janusz came back behind the counter with him and kneeled down to hide. Dacres pictured him balanced on a milk crate.

Dacres looked at Darly, who was sitting back, elegantly waiting, eyes full of questions. They must make quite a pair, he thought, the dishevelled sloth and the debutante. It sounded like a film title. But then here was Leo's big round belly, with a stained apron clinging to an undercrop. They shook hands.

“You didn't paint?” he asked Leo.

“Next week. You came to pay me back?”

“Leo, Leo, Leo …” said Dacres, hurt and innocent, and regretting his park bench.

Leo slapped him on the shoulder, hard.

“What's all the fuss about?” Dacres asked.

“I tell Janusz, if you run when they ask questions you are guilty. But he says his friend ran, so he ran too.”

“Silly boy. Oh: Darly Burner, Leo something. Leo, Darly. Our host.”

“I am
enchanté
,” said Leo, and bowed, and kissed her hand.

“Hello …”

“We thought you were dead, Count. A long time, no coffee. But we have no good luck, these days, do we.”

“Count?” said Darly.

Dacres ordered two coffees and lit a cigarette. When he was back behind the counter, Leo saw Janusz's head propped up—from there he was staring at Darly, knuckles deep in his pale cheeks.

“Was that the police you sent the other way?” Darly asked, lips excited.

“Inquisition,” he said, light. “They want Leo's recipe for borscht.”

Darly asked how Dacres knew the grill. He said he liked it here at night, especially, in part because it was the only place in the city that was open. Also because Leo hated music and never had the radio on. She said she'd never been anywhere like it. They joked again about his life here, returning to that mood, and he dared to poke fun at Lorne, and she joked too, but something returned to her, and she became serious again. Dacres asked if he was always so protective.

“There are things I can't say to him,” Darly admitted. “Example.”

“I don't know if it's just fantasy, this idea that I should be able to say anything to him.”

“Has he asked you to marry him?”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet?”

“Not yet. Who are you to ask, by the way?” she said, amused.

“Do you want to marry him?”

“I think we should talk about something else,” she said, and she laughed, low. Then voice and eyes rose: “Anything else.” She looked over her shoulder at the men. “Flee arrest. Consider the lilies.”

Leo came with the coffees. He said he had a solution to Dacres's last chess challenge: queen to king four.

“Bishop takes queen,” said Dacres. “Sorry.”

“What bishop?” said Leo. He stood there, mystified, hand in his fat chin, glancing down at Darly, who stirred cream into her coffee.

“What bishop, he asks,” repeated Dacres, mocking.

“What bishop?” Leo called out to Janusz. He came over from stage right and stood at Leo's big shoulder.

“Bishop, next to horsey,” said Janusz.

Dacres nodded sagely.

Janusz added: “You helped me.”

“You typed my letter. We're even.”

“You got the job?”

“I have high hopes. Forgive me,” Dacres added, and introduced Darly to Janusz, whom he called a labourer. She smiled sweetly as they shook hands. Leo gave Janusz a shove back towards the counter.

“What job?” Darly asked.

“College of art. Haven't heard yet. Interesting character, the boy,” he said more quietly. “He's a Catholic, a nationalist, and a red. Meaning there's
nothing
he doesn't believe in. I'm teaching him history of art.”

“Really?”

“He got beaten up by strikebreakers, or some such,” Dacres said airily. “Same fellows you saw. So I paid for the doctor.” He hoped she wouldn't ask for any confirming details. “I thought I'd offended him, at a union meeting, but he must have forgiven me. More than once. He's a forgiving chap.”

“You're not in a union, are you?”

“Good Lord no: allergic. But he's in several.”

Hadn't Janusz said the plant was in New Toronto? Did Daddy Burner have something of an iron hand? Best not wonder.

“How could you afford to help him?” she said.

“Oh, I'm not wealthy enough to be stingy, Darly.”

Dacres felt oddly placid and intelligent and charming, as if it were Turner they were discussing, or innovations in perspective. But how far away were her feet, under the table?

“You know, I have trouble believing you were born and raised here.”

She lifted her cup in acknowledgment.

“I'm not sure how to take that.”

“You're the one sarcastic person I've met in this town.”

“That's the one thing Lorne doesn't like about me.”

“What's so awful about Lorne?” Dacres asked. “Seems a nice enough chap. What is it, the uniform?”

“Lorne
,
”
said Darly, wry again. “Not
Lawn. Oar, paw. Roar, raw
.” She was laughing, she brushed her hair back. “There's a difference.”

“I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“
Dahly
—what are you
tawking
about?”

“You're entertaining yourself, I can see that much.”

Both leaned back. She was giggling. He stretched his feet out, looking for hers.

“Lorne's like a spaniel,” she said, calm again, testing the waters. “The more I beat him the more he loves me. I'm terrible to treat him like this.”

“I was worried he'd get peckish and take a bite out of me.”

She looked away at that. He couldn't quite tell if he was offending her, if she wanted him to. It seemed to go back and forth. He asked, “Is he rich?”

“Lorne's from what my father would call a good family, yes, of course.” Now she spoke looking down at the table: “He loves me. Very much. You don't meet people who are so devoted.”

But you're very young, Dacres thought.

“I just don't know where it comes from! He's very earnest. I don't know if I can give it back to him, not the way he deserves.”

“Maybe you can,” said Dacres, thinking: maybe you can't.

“We shouldn't be talking about him like this. It's awful. In his own way he's such a romantic. He's a brick.”

Someone has to suffer, Dacres thought; that's what makes it love.

But the only thing in his head was that she was absolutely beautiful.

Dacres said, “If I were younger, I would have leaped on you hours ago. But I'm not young.”

She spluttered coffee over the table.

Dacres enjoyed the moment, the shock. In his head were all the choices that had brought him to this dismal, unbelievable pit; and this jewel in it.

She shook her head, choking a little. She coughed into a thin square of napkin. Leo and Janusz looked over.

When she was better she turned the conversation to safer things. They talked about Europe and European society and she said of course it was more developed but it was also more ossified—cancerous, now. All that he could see here, he said, was a thin layer of monarchism glued onto the tundra. But he just wasn't looking, she told him, and he liked her vehemence. Well, show me then, he said. She said she would. She'd been to Europe, she told him—she'd seen. Then she refused to say any further. She told him that it seemed to her that it should be the perfect place for him to work—no distractions. Then he refused to answer any further, and they sat in silence until they laughed at its absurdity.

Trying to be as gallant as Lorne, he offered to see her home, expecting her to rebuff him.

Neither of them spoke in the cab driving a long way up Yonge Street. Dacres couldn't think how he would possibly pay. At a red light he looked at piles of tea boxes in storefronts and thought about chance and character. He was looking out and then he was looking at himself reflected, looking at his face and looking out at the sad world.

She took his hand as they went in through a set of gates. The cab went down a long drive and then they were at the elegant house. It was the first house he'd been to in the city, where he'd been part of the troupe's show. He felt her jewellery against his fingers, but he didn't look at her. He looked out, he could see little—trees, trees, and then a lamp over a porte cochère. The cab driver, not knowing where to go, stopped on the gravel. As if they'd driven down to the sea, Dacres thought, the Channel.

Before he could turn to her she was out of the taxi, the door hanging open. The driver turned back expectantly and Dacres wondered if he could make it out into the woods lining the drive.

His eyes were drawn to the warm light in front of the house when the door opened before her.

Then, as he bent towards the driver's shoulder, she had tripped back along the gravel and was leaning into the taxi. He closed his eyes, prepared for an adolescent kiss, but she found his hand and pressed paper into it.

“Take this,” she said. “You need it. Don't say no.”

She slammed the door before he could speak and he opened his palm and looked down at two notes: forty dollars. He did sit in the cab for a few minutes, waiting, but no lights came on in the house.

When he got back to Mrs. Bark's, he found his two suitcases waiting for him on the pavement.

CHAPTER THREE

Dacres woke with the bit, hate, between his teeth. He sneezed four times, allergic to the world, then looked around. He looked away from the uneven chipped dresser to the stained cream wall and up to the low stucco ceiling, and then laid his head back and sighed. A passing engine shook his room. Waking up was like being cut with a razor.