The Disinherited (4 page)

He was suddenly conscious of his hands on the tablecloth, of the expensive restaurant and the sputtering candle that was sending explosions of light and darkness against Valerie’s face. He tried to compose himself. He shifted his legs under the table and moved back in his chair. Then he leaned forward. No, it wasn’t right: he could feel his body tense against the awkward angle.

“Do you want me to read your palm?”

“Sure,” Erik said. He held out his hand to Valerie. If he was going to propose to her it should be something more elaborate, a moonlight ceremony with music and a diamond ring. There should be staging, a prepared speech, a series of declarations leading up to the final flashing moment of betrothal when he slipped the ring on her finger and fell to his knees. Or something entirely casual: a joke in bed about the colour of the curtains or the name of their third child. Or nothing at all. Simply this last dinner in honour of his new job and an ironic farewell at the airport.

“I’ll miss Toronto,” he would say.

“Yes.”

“Well then, good-bye.” He would board the airplane. He would drink scotch and look out the window. A few hours later he would arrive at the University of Alberta. A taxi would take him directly to the office of the chairman.

“I can’t see your hand,” Valerie said. Erik moved it closer to the candle. “I’m sorry,” Valerie said, “I’ve forgotten the book already.” A waiter appeared with a tray of pastries and they both chose the same kind: chocolate icing with a lemon centre.

Erik ate his with his fingers. When he was finished, he wiped his face with his napkin and looked across at Valerie. She had her pastry on a small plate and was cutting it up with a knife and fork. When she opened her mouth her teeth showed, but just a little. That was something he admired about her, her mouth and teeth. They seemed dainty and lady-like to him. He didn’t like people with sloppy faces. He wondered if she could grow herbs: his mother had always lined the bottom of the garden with bursts of parsley and chives.

“What are you thinking about?”

“My mother’s garden,” Erik said. The waiter brought their coffee. Soon they would be able to go back to his apartment and take off their clothes. Valerie was wearing a new dress and would want to hang it up carefully. He felt he only met her at certain moments while she, unaware, went about the business of cycling blood through her anterior regions, breathing, walking from the bed to the window. As he reached into his pocket
for cigarettes, the unfamiliar cloth of the suit scratched against his skin. He offered the pack to her. They had eaten quickly, hardly talking, not really enjoying the food. They had discussed marriage a few times but only theoretically, as if it was something that couldn’t possibly happen to them. Some of their friends had children. Their houses seemed to be filled with broken toys and empty beer bottles. “I don’t know how they can live like that,” Erik would say afterwards, meaning not just the mess but the constant harassment.

“Let’s go,” Valerie said. The waiter had put their bill in a little plastic tray. “Don’t forget to leave a tip.” Outside they walked quickly. It was warm and humid and the streets were filled with cars and people.

“We could go to a movie,” Erik said.

“No. We’ll go back to my place.”

Her apartment was the third floor of a large run-down house near the centre of the city. Although the house, from the outside, seemed almost like a mansion, the apartment itself was small and closed in by slanted ceilings. She had painted the walls white and then filled them with posters, and it looked like thousands of similar apartments in Toronto, speaking distantly of trips to Europe and movies very old and very new. There was a back door leading to a fire escape. It and all the windows were open for the breeze. They sat on the floor, drinking beer. Erik looked at the posters on the wall and tried to imagine the apartment transferred, whole, to Edmonton. “I’ll miss Toronto,” Erik said.

“Yes.”

“I don’t know why,” he said.

“There was never anything here I wanted.” He picked at the label of his beer bottle. “I wonder, you know, if you ever get through things by thinking. I wonder if you ever get through anything at all. Anyway.” He didn’t want the job but he didn’t know what else to do. “Maybe I should go back to the farm for a year. Do physical work. You know.”

Valerie laughed. “You never do any work at all,” she said. “I’ve never known anyone as lazy as you.” She moved over so she was sitting beside Erik. “You don’t have to marry me.”

“It’s not that.”

“We could just say good-bye and send letters to each other. People do it all the time. We could plan a vacation, but at the last minute it would be impossible.”

“Something would come up.”

“Yes,” Valerie said. “Something like that.”

He was looking at one of her posters, a brass church spire. That was the way he felt it should have been: a hot summer day on a terrace somewhere, red wine, overlooking the Mediterranean and laced through with the sounds of sand and water.

“I would have liked to have seen your farm,” she said.

“My father’s farm.”

“Yes,” she said. She had edged away from him again, so that they were facing each other over the beer bottles and the ashtray. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make it so difficult.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Decisions are stupid anyway. It’s better just to let things happen.” She stood up and walked to the hall. Erik followed her. The hall was the only place in the apartment where it was possible to move around freely, without being conscious of the eaves. The house had once belonged to someone wealthy enough to have had servants. The kitchen, only half the size of the bathroom, was a made-over cupboard. “Well,” Valerie said. They were standing in the hall, looking at the stairs. She went into the bedroom. “Help me undo my dress,” she said. Her skin was soft, almost like velvet. He wanted to be swallowed up by her and to be free of her. He slid his tongue between her teeth, sharp and even. She enclosed him. He forgot the dinner. He was left finally with the image of himself flopping on top of her like a fish out of water.

“I love you,” she said. She twisted away from him so that he would be forced to look at her. He wanted to answer her in some way but didn’t know how. He could feel his mouth twitching vaguely. “It’s not important,” she said. The urge to laughter was cramping his stomach and sprayed across the muscles of his face. “What’s so funny?”

“I don’t know.” He reached over her to the night-table and
picked up the package of cigarettes. He rotated it so it would open towards him. She took the package from his hand and skimmed it across the room. “I feel I should be able to respond,” Erik said.

“Yes,” Valerie said. “I guess you should.”

They slept and when they woke up it was dark. It was cooler outside and they walked slowly to Erik’s place, stopping on the way to buy an ice cream cone. “This is what I like about the city,” Erik said. “You can always walk around at night.”

“Can’t you do that in the country? I think it would be nicer.”

“You can walk but there’s nowhere to go.”

They had come to his apartment building. As they went into the lobby, Valerie pointed at the furniture, chained to the floor. “I like the way they do that,” she said. “You know it’s going to be there in the morning.” The padded walls of the elevator had been slashed open so often that they appeared to be a collage of masking tape. Even as they were approaching his door they could hear the ringing of the telephone.

“Erik?” As always, Brian shouted into the phone. Erik could hear the familiar buzzing of the rural party line behind his brother’s voice. “Richard had a heart attack,” Brian said. “Take the night train. Pat or I will meet you.” That was all. Valerie drove down to the station with him and kissed him under the big clock.

“I’ll come with you, if you want.”

“You don’t have to come.”

“I’d like to.”

He looked up at the clock and then kissed her again. “Hurry,” she said. “You’ll miss your train.” She took his arm and started him moving in the direction of the departure gate.

“I’ll call you in a couple of days, when things are calmer.” As he said it he imagined himself getting onto the train and never seeing her again. “Don’t worry,” he said.

“It’s a fast train between stations but it stops a lot.” The conductor pronounced this to Erik, in practiced cadence, and then, pleased with his own wit, continued on his way down the near-empty car. The train moved in fits and starts, pausing at
every town between Toronto and Montreal to exchange grey canvas mailbags. The trip took eight hours: perfect for those who had berths and were travelling the whole way. Erik was only going half the distance, to Kingston, and he sat up the whole time.

He had his feet propped against the seat in front of him. More like Miranda than his father, he gave the impression of being vaguely ethereal, of being cautiously balanced in his movements — as if he didn’t quite trust the reality of his body and was carefully shepherding it through the necessary obstacles. He was large-boned but not heavy. Unmarked by his years on the farm, he had entirely taken on the appearance and smoothness of a city person — one for whom the outdoors was a park where one might seek diversion or renewal but not the place where survival was decided. He was tall with wide-set blue eyes, thick brown hair, and Richard Thomas’s strong features. While the train was stopped at Belleville he went and got some coffee and a hamburger that was heated in a micro-wave oven. It tasted of cardboard and stale tomato paste.

When he was home at Christmas, he went to visit her again. All traces of the leaves and fall colours were completely erased. The trees were stripped bare and metallic, grey-black in the late afternoon sun that glared off the ice on the road, the banks of snow on either side that already, only Christmas, pushed up over some of the fences. An old pick-up truck was parked in the front yard of the school house and wood was stacked high against its southern wall. She opened the door for him as he knocked, not seeming at all surprised to see him. The boots and coat were still near the door but there were no toys scattered about and the highchair had been pushed into the corner. The room was hot and filled with the steam of cooking. She brought him soup and then stood at the table, slicing cheese into thin yellow squares. She put the slices on top of pieces of bread and then slid them into the oven of the cookstove that now, in winter, dominated the room even more than it had in the fall. “I had to trade,” she said, “the kid for the truck. He has a new woman now and she made him take it all to court so he could have visiting rights at
Christmas and during the summer.” As she moved about the kitchen, he noticed again, as he had when he first saw her, the stiffness in the centre of her walk that made her sway slightly, as if she ought to limp. And remembered too the hard, almost corded muscles that wrapped round from her belly to her back, the triangle at the base of her spine that curved wildly to one side. “I knew you’d come back,” she said. She was wearing sweaters, three sweaters, and a heavy tweed skirt. On the back of one of her hands were two long scratches; they might have been made by a cat. “I didn’t dream about you very much,” she said. “Did you dream about me?”

“Once,” Erik said. All he could remember was that it had been in the afternoon and that someone, pounding on his door wanting a book, had woken him up in the middle. Her fingers were bony and strong: now she was back at the table, waiting for him to tell his dream, tearing open a fresh package of cigarettes. The first time they met, in the summer, he had not even asked her name. But this time she had told him. Rose. And he had wanted to say it was the perfect name for her because he found her as dangerous as she was beautiful, to be looked at without touching, but of course said nothing because it would have sounded so appallingly sincere. She still had the loom. It stood in the shadows, but even in that partial light he was struck by the bright colours of the wool. “How did you know I would come back?” he asked.

“I guess I just wanted you too,” she said. She was smoking her cigarette now, nervously, tapping off the ashes before they had a chance to form. The sight of her agitation only increased his own; he pushed his chair back, it squeaked and bumped across the floor. He wondered if the husband still came to have her in the middle of the night, driving from wherever he lived and then sneaking in the door with a flashlight, sliding into bed with her. He had forgotten his soup and now discovered he was holding a spoon in his hand; he bent his head towards the bowl and moved his hands, but the spoon slipped, dropping out of his fingers onto the table.

“Nerves,” he said.

“Do you want me to feed you?”

“It’s all right,” Erik said. The soup was thick with vegetables — carrots and celery and potatoes. He loaded the spoon up carefully, making sure it wasn’t too full, and brought it to his mouth.

“Do you like college?”

“It’s all right,” Erik said. The room seemed to be getting warmer. He took off his coat. He wondered how she could be wearing so many sweaters. The room was permeated with the odour of woodsmoke, cedar and maple, but through that he could smell his sandwich. As quickly as he thought of it she was on her feet, standing over the stove and opening the oven.

“It’s not burnt at all,” she said. There was a pile of split wood beside the stove and she re-filled the firebox before bringing his food to the table. “It’s hopeless,” she said. “Soon you’ll have lines on your forehead and smoke cigarettes. What you need is a hat.” She went back to the stove and got herself some soup. “The Chinese tell each other their dreams every morning. Anyway, how are you?”

“I’m fine,” Erik said. The question pushed him away from her. He felt suddenly depressed and disinterested in words.

“It snowed so much,” she said. “I didn’t want her to go but they just took her. His stupid machine is still here though; I bet she won’t ever let him get that in the house. All the oil froze anyway and some of the tubes split open.” Her face was still tanned but her hair had darkened without the summer sun. It was streaked and wispy. “You can finish your dream if you want,” she said. “What happened to the giraffe?” With the child gone she seemed different: more present in a way because that part of her which had been constantly attentive to the child was now integrated into her and asking something from him. It was there not so much in her voice as in the movements of her arms and hands which swam around as she talked, shaping the space between them in a way which was unclear but somehow threatening. “I went to the city and saw a play,” she said. “It was about two paralytics who had only one wheelchair between them.”