The Romantic (23 page)

“Hang up!” I hiss, frantic in case Abel mentions the abortion.

He doesn’t, although his concern for my health begins to strike my father as odd. “In bed?” my father says. “No, no, she’s up and around.” To me, he says,“I know he’s the one who broke it off, but he couldn’t be more worried about you. He couldn’t be sorrier.”

“He’s too late.”

“Well, he’s in the slough of despond by the sounds of it. And you’ll probably bite my head off for saying so, but you don’t seem to be all that happy and gay yourself.”

“Happy?” I say, uncomprehending. “Gay?”

A week later the letters start arriving. I cry to see my name on the envelope in his handwriting. I weaken. I don’t open the envelope though. I burn it in the metal wastepaper
basket. Watching the flames, for those five or six seconds, I let myself wonder about the contents: the poem or drawing, the plea, the explanation. “He doesn’t love me,” I say, so that I won’t be tempted to put the fire out.

Sometimes it goes out on its own. “He doesn’t love me,” I say and light another match.

I graduate from high school with a seventy-six percent average. The year before, my average was ninety-three, but that was back when I still cared. Seventy-six strikes me as improbably high, considering how I never once raised my hand during class and how completely unprepared I was for the final exams. As long as I passed, I kept telling myself, that was all that mattered. I had no plans for going on to university. In fact, I’d already landed a full-time job at a second-hand bookstore downtown.

I write my last exam on a Monday morning in June. That same day, at four o’clock, I start work
AT BOOKS
!
BOOKS!
books
! My hours are from four until ten, Monday to Saturday. By the end of the first day I know all there is to know, which is next to nothing. By the end of the first week, I feel as if I’ve been there for years. I feel secure and unpressured. Hours go by when I don’t think of Abel at all.

There is only one other employee, Don Shaw, who is also the manager. He is in his mid-forties, about my height. He’s a bachelor, he never married. He has small clever eyes, narrow shoulders and wide hips. His hair is beige and dense, like sod. One day a mentally ill man comes into the store and calmly starts taking books from the shelves and throwing them on the floor, and when Don Shaw says,“I think you had better leave,” the man says in an aristocratic English
accent,“I think you had better buy yourself a new hairpiece,” then strolls out. Afterwards Don Shaw sees me glancing at his hair and he leans toward me and says, slyly,“Pull. Go ahead.”

He’s always inviting me to touch him, feel how icy his hands are, feel how the hard tubular lump on his forearm moves around under the skin like a loose battery. He also has
things
he wants me to touch, such as the leather upholstery on his hundred-year-old divan. He lives only a few minutes away in a low-rise apartment building adjoining a laundromat. The vibration from the washing machines tilts his pictures, the steam from the dryers pours through his heating vents and bakes the plaster. He says,“It’s like living in the belly of a beast.”

He says, based on nothing,“You’d love it.”

He craves warmth. He wears thick-ribbed corduroy pants, grey or brown, and drab sweater-vests from some bygone era. On the most sweltering days, the shirt under the vest might be short-sleeved, but not necessarily. He looks like what he is: a failed man of letters. During his shift, which is ten in the morning until I show up, he reads textbooks from the philosophy section. At night he devotes himself to writing poems he calls Exhalations. I ask if he has been published. He seems not to hear. And then he says,“When you refuse to rupture the flow of your thought with line breaks and punctuation, you find that even the most enthusiastic editors, who once compared you to Joyce and Wallace Stevens, stop returning your phone calls.”

A muscle twitches in his cheek. He could say more, but won’t. He hoards his injuries. He is bitterly amused by his
own thoughts. When I arrive at the store he smiles to himself as if to suggest he knows exactly why I’m late or early or right on time, and for a moment I wonder if it isn’t true that my small, careful life isn’t actually reckless and silly.

“Madame Kirk,” he says.

“Don Shaw,” I say.

Our greeting ritual.

Even talking about him to other people I say Don Shaw, both names. Don on its own is too informal. And Mr. Shaw, if I called him that he’d think I was being sarcastic.

The name of the man who owns the place is Ernie Watson. Him we call the Fire Chief, owing to the fact that our paycheques arrive (via special delivery mail) in Halifax Fire Department envelopes. For the five years that Don Shaw has worked at
B?OK
s!
BOOKS! BOOKS
! he has never once spoken to the Fire Chief let alone met him. Any money left over in the safe at the end of the week goes into a numbered bank account; the utility bills are handled long distance. Occasionally there’s a problem that can’t be overlooked (the toilet flooding, the lock on the front door jamming … both occur during my first week) and then we have to phone a panicky old woman named Beryl. “Oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear,” she says rapidly, as if it were one long word. She sends her husband, Buddy, who has tearful eyes and the loveliest hands, narrow and white; while you’re explaining what’s wrong he holds them up in the manner of a surgeon waiting for his gloves.

Don Shaw has no doubt that the Fire Chief bought the store
because
of the frayed wiring and the towers of yellowing books in the basement, the ancient oil furnace down there,
that he’s just biding his time until, without any outright foul play on his part, this tinderbox burns to the ground and he can collect a multi-million-dollar insurance settlement.

“So if it happens,” I say,“it’ll be in the winter when the furnace is on.”

Don Shaw gets my drift. “By which time,” he says,“our Madame Kirk will have gone on to bigger and better things.”

I applied for this job because the ad in the newspaper said “easy-going atmosphere” and I thought I might have a few free minutes, here and there, to study shorthand. I was overly pessimistic. Here and there I have hours at a stretch. Hardly anybody comes in, and those who do sit on boxes of recently arrived books (no sense unpacking them when the shelves are already crammed) and read for hours at a time, we don’t care. How the store works is, we buy used books at ten percent of the cover price, any kind of book, university textbook, government manual, pornography, the only criterion being reasonable intactness. Hardly anybody shows up with just a boxful; the stuff arrives by the carload—some dead pharmacist’s reference library, or a housewife’s complete Harlequin Romance collection. “You’ll buy it
all?
” the person says, wide-eyed at such luck. Yes, we’ll buy it all. Then we’ll sell it at fifty percent of the cover price. But since, in fact, we
won’t
sell it, since we take in ten times more stock than we get rid of, the system is mad. Furthermore, as Don Shaw admitted during my interview, the Fire Chief has no way of keeping track of all this inventory. We could be stealing half of it for resale to some other second-hand bookstore.

“You don’t have to be smart to work here,” he said. “You don’t have to be charming and full of pep. You just have to be trustworthy.” He scanned me up and down, a relay between my breasts and mouth, as if in these features lay the clues to my integrity. When he stopped to meet my eye, his expression was shrewd and bereaved. I thought I must remind him of some old flame. He said,“How trustworthy is Louise Kirk?”

“Extremely,” I answered. “Perfectly.”

It’s true, I am. A year earlier, before the party and Vancouver and the placenta in a juice glass (a sight I wished I’d been spared), I probably would have helped myself to the odd paperback novel, because why not? I lived by no overriding principles. What governed my behaviour was how hopeful or hopeless I felt on any given day. I’d have stolen the paperbacks on days when my horizons seemed to have shrunk to the next moment. I’d have felt myself entitled.

Now, with my horizons as narrow as they’ve ever been, I feel entitled to very little. I
want ve
ry little, only to earn some money while teaching myself how to type and take shorthand, and to go out occasionally, to go out on a date. Without Abel, I’m nobody, I have nothing, I’m resigned to that. All I have is the oxlike instinct that shoves you toward the next moment. If I’m not going to jump off a cliff, and I guess I’m not, then I may as well try to make my life bearable. I can’t imagine ever again being wildly happy, but maybe I can be happy
enough.

I can at least try to stay out of trouble, and with that in mind I go the Hassle-free Clinic in Yorkville and get myself a prescription for birth control pills. Another secret to be
kept from my father. Although, that same day, I confess to him why it is I haven’t heard back from any universities: I never mailed in any applications.

He is crestfallen. I am surprised to discover what big plans he’d had for me. Lawyer. Professor. Biologist. Diplomat.

I say,“Diplomat! Are you kidding? I’m the most undiplomatic person you know.”

He throws around his arms. “You could see the world! Meet fascinating, exciting, cultivated people. Learn new languages. New ways of life!”

I say,“I want to learn how to type.”

I have a movie in my head of my near future. It’s very detailed, in the beginning anyway, influenced by the layout and atmosphere of my father’s office and by Aunt Verna’s stories of her years working downtown for the president of a large brokerage firm. The opening scene has me taking dictation. My boss is in his forties. He is a good-natured, portly man, not the brains of the company, but in no danger of losing his job. It’s winter, the end of the day, the streetlights have just come on. In the windows of the building next door you can see secretaries putting the covers over their typewriters. In the office where we are, there’s a cozy feeling, a winding down of efficiency. My boss loosens his tie. I uncross my legs. I wear a tweed skirt and white tailored blouse. I close my notebook and say,“I’ll type these up first thing in the morning.”

He waves his hand. “No hurry.”

On the way back to my desk, I pass the desks of other secretaries. We say goodnight to each other. A few of us regularly eat lunch together at the snack bar of a department
Store. Grilled-cheese or clubhouse sandwiches, apple pie à la mode. Afterwards we stop at the cosmetics counter and slash our wrists with lipstick and say,“Is that too red?” “What do you think?” Occasionally one of us breaks down and buys a tube. To buy almost anything aside from food and nylons is to splurge.

I take the subway home. I am an expert at the origami folding that keeps the pages of my newspaper out of other people’s faces. I read “Dear Abby” and do the crossword. Near my stop there’s a fruit stand, and every evening I buy a fresh navel orange for tomorrow’s breakfast. The walk to my place is about ten minutes, not long. I live on the top floor of a Victorian house, two rooms plus a bathroom with a clawfoot tub. There is a cat—grey, fat, shy. There is an asparagus fern on top of the refrigerator. A two-burner stove. For supper I scramble eggs or heat up a can of spaghetti and meatballs. The kitchen table is an old wooden drop-leaf pushed into a corner.

Suddenly, in this movie, it’s summer. I have changed out of my office clothes and into white shorts and a blue-and-white-striped T-shirt. I wash the dishes listening to classical music on the radio, then I make a cup of coffee and take it out onto the fire escape. The view is of the roofs of other such houses and of treetops and stars coming out.

One night the new guy in the second-floor apartment also happens to be on the fire escape. We start talking, and he invites me down for a glass of wine. He’s a medical or engineering student, or he’s studying for the bar. He’s about five foot nine, nice looking, not too handsome, not too straight but not a hippy, either. Blond or sandy-haired.
Maybe he wears wire-framed glasses. His friends are few and close. His interests lie outside of the visual arts and music and science. So he’s not a medical student, then. A law student, that’s better. The kind of person who takes sides, who fights for what he believes in.

You see what I’m driving at. He isn’t Abel. He can’t be anything like Abel, and most of the time he doesn’t even exist. I finish my coffee and go back inside and sit in a wingback chair and read a Jane Austen novel, or it could be that I’m already at Dickens. (I’m working my way through the great literary works in alphabetical order according to author.) The odd time that I
do
keep things going with the guy from downstairs, that I accept his invitation and let the night advance until we’re kissing, the movie always flaps off the reel.

If this is loyalty to Abel, I’m tired of it. I admit that I love him. My love is a fact, like the law of gravity. But it doesn’t change anything. What am I being loyal to? What is there left to betray?

All I want is to go out on dates with nice young men anyone would approve of. Maybe I want to sleep with them. I’m so lonely sometimes. Sometimes at the store I have such a desperate, pent-up feeling I wonder if I’m turning into Don Shaw. I try to concentrate on my shorthand exercises but I keep glancing up at the window and willing every half-decent-looking guy under thirty to come through the door. I lower my standards to include the short, the squat. And then one of these guys does come in and he heads straight for the pornography section. Predictably enough. The store is in the middle of a block of pawnbrokers and
plumbing-supply outlets. Two buildings down is a hard-drinking bar called the Morgan, and when I leave at ten o’clock there are always a couple of middle-aged men swaying on the sidewalk. They wear cheap suit jackets. An inordinate number have full heads of hair, neatly combed. Some have ducktails. Every so often I get one of these guys in the store, and either he’s just a friendly drunk or he starts pestering me and crashing into the shelves, and I have to grab the broom and herd him out. It’s not as frightening as it sounds. It can be funny in a pathetic way. There’s one guy (an exception in that he’s completely bald), he calls me Slim, and after I throw him out and lock the door he pounds on the glass yelling,“Slim! I love you! Hey, Slim, let’s get married!” and the only thing that upsets me about this is, I know how he feels. I know that urgency.