The Romantic (17 page)

I think about the Vietnam War and wonder, if Canada should ever get involved, where Abel would draft-dodge to. Germany? For long moments I fall under the street’s enchantment and think nothing. It is during one of these spells that the Richters’ front door opens.

I jump to my feet.

Mr. Richter steps out. He is thinner than I remember, but not bent over or feeble, as I had feared. Jingling keys, he goes down the steps and toward the car. Before he reaches it the front door opens again.

“Karl!”

Mrs. Richter! With white hair! Abel never told me. And she’s fat, she’s gotten fat! She’s wearing a red bathrobe, not the same old one, surely, she wouldn’t fit into it. She calls out something in German. Mr. Richter holds up a finger, gives a curt nod:
Ja, danke schön
for the reminder, he won’t forget. He climbs into the car and drives off. She descends the porch steps. Hands on hips, she surveys her yard. She squints my way and for a delirious moment I’m convinced she has spotted me. Then she bends at the waist. When she straightens she is clutching a bunch of carrots. She turns and goes back into the house.

It is all I can do not to run over there and pound on the door. It is all I can do.

The morning passes. Eleven-thirty. Noon. Mr. Richter doesn’t return. Nobody enters the park. I am the street’s witness, its prisoner. I drink from the fountain, pee among the shrubs, occasionally I stand on my slab to get a better view of the mountains bolting out of their laurels of cloud. Otherwise I stay put, sitting now on both the jeans
and
the jacket and using the overnight case as a footstool while I try to read the book I brought along, the J. S. Bach biography. I wonder if Abel knows that Bach, too, was orphaned. This, I learned on the plane. Here, in the park, I have skipped ahead to Bach’s marriage to Anna Magdalena. The book describes her as “a flower or a star … so faithful was she, so unwearying, so simply useful and so courageous with the courage that only women have or by natural decree need to have.”

Nothing much has happened across the road, not since Mrs. Richter went inside. Late morning she opened the curtains, then the window of the room nearest the garage. A little later she opened the living-room drapes with a flourish, standing in the gap and throwing them apart as if she were about to break into song.

Sirius, by that time, had abandoned his post. I figure they let him out into the back yard, which adjoins somebody else’s back yard, the two properties separated by a chain-link fence that I can see part of where it extends past the Richters’ house. So anyone leaving by a rear door would have to come around to the front. I presume. Maybe I should make certain, and get something to eat while I’m at
it. Suppose I ran over, reconnoitred, pulled up a bunch of carrots, ran back?

I close the book and set it down beside me on the slab. If I get caught … If I get caught, I get caught. It’s almost two o’clock, and I’m starving. I’m jet-lagged. I’m pregnant, for God’s sake!

Just as I’m coming to my feet I see a skinny guy hurrying down the sidewalk across the road, about fifty yards to my left. His head is bent to one side and held there unnaturally. His hair is a burning bush, an orange Afro. He wears flapping beige trousers, not bell-bottoms, just trousers too big and belted high on his torso, and a short-sleeved sky-blue shirt with a navy collar. For all that he’s speeding along, he doesn’t swing his arms.

“A weirdo,” I think. I can guess where he’s headed. Sure enough, there he goes, turning onto the Richters’ property.

On the back of his shirt, in large navy letters above an inverted pyramid of bowling pins, it says
GARY
. Did Abel ever mention a Gary? I’m sure he never mentioned a guy who wears an imaginary straitjacket and yet belongs to a bowling team.

Gary reaches up (so his arms
do
move) to bang the knocker. The door opens.

And out comes Abel.

He shuts the door and follows Gary down the porch steps. My heart punches at my ribs. No, it’s not my heart, it’s the baby leaping up, sensing proximity to its other genetic half. I step from behind the tree.

I step back.

I’ve lost my nerve. I forgot how good looking he was. Or
has he gotten even better looking? His hair has grown. His arms, too, they seem longer, more muscular. I move back onto the sidewalk and watch him and Gary disappear around the corner. I dash to the rock, stuff my jacket, jeans and book into the case, grab it and my purse and start running. When I reach the corner they are only half a block ahead of me, stopped at a fruit vendor’s and getting yelled at.

I slip behind a telephone pole and step partway out of my shoes, which are already giving me blisters. The yelling woman wears a black kerchief; she waves her arms around. Gary stands there, hands stiff at his sides, head still cocked toward his left shoulder. Abel’s head is also cocked, though less drastically. It is so familiar to me, the slow nod that means you have the enormousness of his attention. The woman can have no idea how passionately and sympathetically she is being listened to. I wish I were her. At that moment I would gladly recast my skulking self into a ranting foreign woman who, purely because she
is
ranting and foreign, has (I’ve no doubt) won Abel’s heart.

She waves her hands, slaps her breasts. I can’t make out what she’s going on about—a diatribe against long-haired boys, I imagine. But then Abel says something and she bleats out a laugh and seizes an apple from a bushel basket and presses it on him. He takes it and bends down closer to her, and with both hands she brushes back his hair, as a lover would, to kiss his forehead. I am surprised, but only for a second. Of course! She adores him! She is one of his million best friends. She gives him another apple. He passes it to Gary, who flings out one stiff arm to snatch it.

They move on.

I step back into my sadistic shoes and follow, scuttling from mailbox to newspaper box to phone booth. As I pass the old lady she glares. I smile at her. Anyone who loves Abel, I have a soft spot for. Even Gary I am warming up to because of how he walks almost sideways so that he can direct his tipped-over head at Abel’s face, and because his whole upper body bounces in sprees of nodding as though he savagely endorses everything Abel says.

I have no plan. If they’re on their way to Gary’s place, and they go inside, I guess I’ll find some bushes to wait behind. Obscurely I feel as if I’m building up my courage by reacquainting myself with the way Abel looks: his hair, how he’s dressed—bell-bottomed blue jeans, a silver belt of linked stars, like sheriff badges, a blue-and-purple tie-dyed T-shirt under which his shoulders move in the loose roll of a person far from the grip of heartache or regret.

Oh, Abel!

Has he stopped loving me? How is that possible? How do you love somebody one day, and the next day you don’t? I
know
who he is. By letting me love him, he made a path to himself, and what I gathered up is mine. If he doesn’t love me, how can he not love the perfect version of himself
in
me?

These thoughts start me crying. I am a spectacle, clumsy and darting, limping, crouching. Whimpering “Excuse me … Sorry” to Saturday shoppers I zip by and accidentally bash with my overnight case before we turn onto a desolate strip of auto-body shops and second-hand clothing emporiums. Here, however, with fewer people about, I’m more visible. I cross to the other side of the street, just in
time. A few seconds later Abel glances over his shoulder, then he and Gary duck into an alley, where Abel draws something out of his pocket. A cigarette. No, a joint, I can tell by the way he inhales. He passes it to Gary. As soon as Gary inhales he has a coughing fit and spins around smacking his thighs. Abel thumps him on the back. When the coughing abates they re-enter the street and start crossing, but on a diagonal away from me, headed for the building on my right. They go inside.

It’s an old theatre converted into a tavern or a coffee house,“
ear pit
,” the mauve neon sign says. The brick is painted a washed-out pink, the door a purplish brown. I suppose you’re meant to think along the lines of ear tunnel, pathway into the unconscious. Then I discern the unlit B. Oh, it’s the Bear Pit, where Abel was on that Sunday night he didn’t phone me.

Across the front are four vaulted windows clogged on the inside with potted plants. I press my face to the window farthest from the door and peer through the foliage. (Here I am again, peering through foliage.) I make out a big space, fluted pillars, small round tables, each bearing a little candle. There seem to be a lot of hippies sitting around and drinking from paper cups. Facing me at the table closest to the window, a girl with the word
Love
inked on her forehead and with daisies stuck to her hair inserts a cigarette between her lips and leans forward to light it at the candle. When she glances up I move to the next window and see, against the back wall, an orchestra pit, or the bear pit I guess it is. It houses an electric keyboard, a couple of microphones and an electric guitar leaning against a bar
stool. A red footlight lends the tableau a private, innerrecess feel. An ear-tunnel feel.

From this window I can also see booths along the wall to my left. It’s brighter there owing to the illuminated red paper lanterns that hang above each table. I spot Gary, his orange Afro. He is sliding into a seat.

And now I see Abel, standing a few feet away. A blond girl wearing a full-length red cape tries to steal his apple and he tosses it up for her to catch. She misses. Her laugh pierces the window glass. A petite brunette sinks against him in a theatrical swoon, and even though I can tell by the respectful way he eases her upright that there is nothing going on between them, a vein of jealousy opens in me and alerts me to my claim on him.

I decide to go inside. “I’ve got nothing to lose,” I think. I don’t know what I mean, it seems I have everything to lose. I put on some lipstick while continuing to peer through the window. An elderly black man wearing white trousers, a white dress shirt and a white homburg strolls up to Abel. Mr. Earl, I’m guessing, the old saxophonist Abel talked about a couple of times. He offers Abel a flask. Abel accepts, takes a long swig and then opens his mouth and shakes his head as if he’d just drunk gasoline. Mr. Earl nods like a physician witnessing the desired effect. Does he know that Abel is only seventeen? His hand alights, big as a raven, on Abel’s shoulder, and the two of them head over to Gary’s booth, Mr. Earl getting in first, Abel sliding in next to him.

Abel is now faced away from the door, and this calms me somewhat, as it means I can put off the showdown a little longer.

There is a cover charge of two dollars. I pay and slink over to the only empty table in sight. It’s behind a pillar that blocks off most of the orchestra pit, but I can peek around it to see Abel, who, as I sit, is taking another drink from the flask. I blow out my candle. A moment later a waitress strolls by. “Oh,” she says,“bummer,” and extracts a lighter from the pocket of her jeans.

“It’s okay,” I say, placing my hand over the wick.

For drink there is either apple cider or grapefruit juice, for food only peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches. I order two sandwiches and a large cider. Meanwhile, somebody is tuning the guitar and talking into a microphone, so I move my chair until I can see the orchestra pit without putting myself in full view of Abel. The guitarist is a delicate-looking Art Garfunkel type, frizzy blond hair transformed into a rosy vapour by the footlight. He starts off playing straight blues, then bursts into a wilder Jimi Hendrix sound. There aren’t any lyrics, unless his off-key groaning counts. At every slide up to a high note he winces, and I am disturbed by what seems to be a spastic expression of my dread inflicted on his features without his even realizing.

In the middle of a climactic segment of repeated wails my order arrives. I begin devouring the sandwiches. The sense I have is not of eating or even filling a cavity but of stanching a hemorrhage, packing on the gauze, more gauze. I stare at Abel, who, when the piece ends, applauds by slapping the table, since his other hand is occupied with tipping the flask at his mouth. Why is he drinking so much? Nobody else seems to be, not even Mr. Earl.

“For my next tune,” says the guitarist,“I’m going to be
joined by a cat who is no stranger to the Pit. Abel Richter, last heard …”

The rest is lost in whistling and cheers. I can’t believe it. As a kid, Abel suffered almost paralyzing stage fright when he had to perform in front of an audience. Well, no wonder then, no wonder he’s fortifying himself with liquor.

He gets to his feet and starts coming this way. I look down, now not being the moment I want him to spot me. When I look up again he is descending the pit stairs and I perceive the old shyness in his bowed head and then, once he is seated at the keyboard, in the studious hunch of his back. Immediately, as though the least deliberation will change his mind, he sets down a series of soft chords.

It’s another lyric-less blues-rock piece. Abel remains in the background, submitting quiet responses to the flashy guitar licks. Every note the guitar fires off, he catches on a cushion of sound, and I am reminded of when we netted dazzled moths and set them free in the ravine; there is, in his playing, that same quality of a fragile transaction being intelligently and lovingly undertaken. I glance at Mr. Earl. He nods to the beat. Across from him, Gary also nods but at a higher frequency and one not obviously associated with the music.

I look back at Abel. His face is hidden behind his hair. Floodlit as he is, in red and from below, his arms appear sunburned and oddly, childishly tubular. I seem to unknot and fall toward him in a sheltering sprawl, the whole room banked his way. The piece ends and he comes to his feet. I come to my feet. People yell,“More!” The guitarist says,“He’ll be back next set!” Abel leaves the pit and I walk
around the tables and through applause like gunfire, whistling like rockets. I imagine myself to be blazingly conspicuous and wonder at his failing to notice me.

He appears to be headed for the toilets. I follow. When he gets to the corridor, however, he strides past the washrooms, past the kitchen, then out an exit door, which is ajar.