The Romantic (36 page)

There are days when neither of them comes back, and
I
‘m left to answer the phone and to try to decipher Mr. Roberts’s handwriting. It’s in the evenings that he turns his attention to the family history, working here in the office until all hours, which means that every morning I arrive to find a stack of scrawled notes on my desk. Nothing of a personal nature yet, just general information about Pembrokeshire, Wales, in the mid-1700s: local industry, diet, religion, customs, that sort of thing. So now I know about corn dollies and byres and whinberries and that a cat born in May brings rats to the house and that, back then, if a husband was “impotent, a leper or had fetid breath” his wife
could take half of his possessions and kick him out of the house.

Interesting work, as my father predicted. Well, interesting enough to keep my mind off Abel, at least while I’m typing. Still, if it weren’t for Suzanne I’d probably call in sick some mornings. When I wake up, the thought of seeing her is what gets me out of bed, and if for some reason she doesn’t show up that day, I’m as crushed as any of her clients. She is like a delivery of flowers, always a mild thrill when she comes out of her office and drops onto the reception chesterfield to light a cigarette and chat. The way she kicks off her shoes, crosses her dancer’s legs, leans back and shakes her hair seems both unselfconscious and contrived. Staged, in other words, but also entirely true to her nature.

“Well,” I say to get her started,“how did the audition go?” and cheerfully, ruefully, she’ll say how she knew she didn’t have a hope, they wanted an ingenue type this time (a couple of days ago it was a schoolmarm type, before that it was a wholesome type), but what the heck, she gave it a shot. If there hasn’t been an audition, I’ll ask about Howard and Roy, her two “gentlemen admirers.” Not “boyfriends,” because they’re both pushing sixty, but not lovers, either; she won’t have sex with married men. She allows hand holding, though, and lingering hugs. “Lucky them,” I say. No, she says, she’s the lucky one, and it has nothing to do with being extravagantly wined and dined. It’s the mature conversation, the wisdom and perspective. She hopes one day to fall in love with a widower who doesn’t worship his dead wife and who wants to start a new family. She says—
and I can’t tell if she’s serious—“A distinguished older man down on his hands and knees with a bunch of little kids crawling all over him, that’s my girlish dream.”

It turns out that Mr. Roberts is a former gentleman admirer, something I find out after I catch him sliding his hand around her waist as he’s leaving the office. She says,“That’s exactly what ended it. All that pawing me in public. And he was always trying to get me to go to bed with him, but I wasn’t interested, even though he was divorced by then. This was, what? Five, six years ago now.” She starts bouncing on her toes. “Slung!” she yells. “We’ve already crossed the line! There’s a line, and we’ve crossed it!”

I laugh. She has him exactly. “What did he mean by that?”

“Oh, that once you’ve kissed a woman on the lips, there’s no turning back.”

“You kissed Mr. Roberts on the lips?”

“We’d been drinking. Slung!” She begins aggressively unbuttoning her blouse. “I’m going to take off my clothes. Now, you can stay or you can leave, but by God, I’m taking off my clothes!”

I laugh so hard I start to choke. I start to cry. (Shades of my first date with Troy.) She brings me a box of Kleenex and pats my shoulder. “Do you like Chinese food?” she says.

In her white Volkswagen we drive to a restaurant down on Dundas Street. “I love this place,” she says after we’ve both ordered the four-dollar chicken-ball special. “But for the longest time I avoided it because it’s where I met the man who broke my heart. He passed himself off as a lonely widower, and then one day, there he was on the front page
of the
Financial Post
with his arm around ‘Margaret, his charming wife of twenty-five years.’”

“That must have been hard,” I say.

“It was. And now—” she opens her hands,“it isn’t.”

My turn. I know that’s why she told me her story, so that I’ll feel free to tell her mine. But I can’t. The thought of Abel is still such a weight, and I’m afraid I’ll start crying again. I notice some men at another table casting her glances. “You could have anybody you wanted,” I say.

“So could you.”

“Oh, come on.”

She rests her chin on her palm. “What do you usually do after work?”

“Go home. Read.”

“You don’t go out?”

“Not very often.”

“Why not?”

I shrug. She looks at me a little longer, then changes the subject to her great-aunt Olive, who lived somewhere along Dundas Street during the Depression. “She was an elevator operator at Eaton’s. All her working life confined to a box and a ten-line script: ‘Third floor, ladies’ apparel. Fourth floor, men’s overcoats.’ She loved it, though. She never married because back then you couldn’t marry and keep your job. She used to say, You never know who’s going to step through those doors.’”

Three nights later we go out again. To a movie this time,
Alice Doesn’t Uve Here Anymore
, which is about a woman deciding to start a new life as a lounge singer after her husband dies.

“She’s already ahead of the game,” I say afterwards. “She has an inborn talent. Like you.”

“There are about fifty directors in this city who would beg to differ.”

“Your imitation of Mr. Roberts, that was perfect. You’re an actress. You know you are. You have a stimulating profession.” I think of her laughing retired clients and add,
“Two
stimulating professions.” I sigh.

She pats my arm. “I take it,” she says,“that the great Welsh saga isn’t making your heart beat faster.”

“Oh, it’s okay. It’s just … well, working in that office isn’t like working as an elevator operator. I
know
who’s going to step through those doors.”

“So what would you rather be doing?”

“Working in some
bustling
office, I suppose.”

On my lunch hour I start reading the classified ads, but all the jobs I’d qualify for sound like dreary slave labour. For about five minutes I wonder if I should go to university. To study what, though? And I’d be older than everybody else, and I was never very good at sitting still for a lecture. I’m toying with the idea of being a cocktail waitress (if my mother did it, I guess I could give it a try) when Suzanne tells me about a woman she knows—a child psychologist with a hectic practice—who’s looking for a receptionist-secretary.

“What’s she like?” I ask.

“A cross between Joan Fontaine and Ingrid Bergman. Soft and motherly but very elegant. Mid-forties. Divorced from a callow plastic surgeon named Blake.”

“Do you think she’d hire me?”

“Why not? Can you take shorthand?”

“If the person talks very slowly.”

“She talks slowly. Come to think of it, she talks
very
slowly.”

I get the job and start two weeks later, with the blessing of Mr. Roberts, whose pregnant granddaughter has decided she’d like to be his typist. It’s late April, robins hopping around on lawns, yellow forsythia flowers burning through the morning fog. As I walk from the St. George subway station to the office, which is on the ground floor of a Victorian house near the University of Toronto, I have the brisk, wide-awake feeling that I used to detect, and envy, in the steps of other secretaries. Maybe it’s because I’m more than a secretary. From the very first morning I was comforting frightened mothers—“I’m sure Dr. Mclver sees this kind of thing all the time,” “Kids bounce back sooner than you think”—and taking weepy children on my lap. That day I didn’t leave until seven o’clock. The next day it was after eight. Katherine—she said to call her that when it’s just the two of us—told me I could go home as soon as the last patient was in her office, but I didn’t feel right abandoning my post while the mother or father or babysitter was still out in the waiting room. I used the time to read through case histories and try to acquaint myself with all the amazingly various, heartsickening behaviours of unhappy children.

After six months Katherine gives me a good raise and I decide to find another apartment. I’m prone to changing residences in the fall, but the reason has more to do with
Abel, whose ghost hasn’t vacated my bedroom yet. If I sleep in there (as opposed to in the living room), whether it’s on the bed or on the floor, I’m almost guaranteed to dream about him making love to another woman. “I don’t know what to do,” I say one day to Katherine, and she’s the one who says that the solution may be simply to find somewhere else to live.

I first told her about Abel one sweltering July evening over take-out pizza. It had been an especially long day, we had our feet up on her desk, the fan blowing full-force into our faces, and we were talking about Nicole, an eight-year-old who kept taping her mouth shut and was threatening to
sew
it shut. I felt that the mother was somehow to blame because of her strange nonchalance, not to mention her failure to hide the masking tape. Katherine said that of course the mother came into the picture (she steers clear of words such as
blame)
but that the very concerned, very charming father was no doubt part of it as well. The conversation then turned to charming men in general, to philanderers, and then to the conduct of Katherine’s charming, philandering ex-husband, how one time, at a dinner party they were giving, he followed another man’s wife right into the washroom. To make sure there were clean towels, he afterwards claimed.

“I’m sure he half believed it,” Katherine said. “As he was following her in, I’m sure he was saying to himself, ‘I’d better check about the towels.’ That way, he could say to
me—”
she smiled,“and he always did, it was the same story every time—that the sex just happened, he had no idea how.”

This struck me as so infuriatingly like what Abel would
have said, had I let him speak, that I launched into my story. But in comparison to what she’d put up with—the calculated innocence, the
cruelty
—Abel’s betrayal, as I heard myself describing it, sounded almost benign. “He never meant to hurt me,” I said. “I know that.”

“Maybe not,” Katherine said. “All the same, you were right to end it. You acted bravely.”

I took this to mean that she wished she’d kicked her husband out sooner.

She is a gently ironic woman with large grey eyes. There is a dreaminess about her that makes you think she isn’t even listening until she says something so unequivocal or reasonable (such as,“Why don’t you find somewhere else to live?”) that your entire way of thinking is suddenly untangled.

I am hoping to get a two-bedroom flat, but through yet another friend of Suzanne’s I end up with an entire two-bedroom frame bungalow. The owners, a retired couple named Stan and Ann Canary, have bought a mobile home in Florida and want to hold on to the house as an investment. There’s a rose garden, a sun porch, a turret from which you can see the lake, and two semi-feral cats that come and go. On the day I sign the lease, the cats are lolling on the lawn, Suzanne is flirting with Stan Canary, and it occurs to me that the cramp in my throat is from happiness. “I’m happy,” I think, as though it were a trick—like balancing on a wire—that I’ve unexpectedly pulled off. I’m wobbly, I haven’t quite got the knack, but it’ll come.

It comes and goes, like the cats, whom I name Stan and Ann. It slips through the crack in my heart. I can be doing
nothing, looking out my bedroom window at a squirrel clutching its chest in the manner of Mrs. Carver, and there it is: that surge in the blood.

The following spring my father and Mrs. Carver announce their engagement. “Now that you seem settled,” my father says, and I say,“Don’t tell me
I’ve
been holding you up!”

“No, no,” he says. “We just didn’t want to go jumping the gun.”

“The way you always do.” I kiss him. I’m happy.

The wedding takes place on a warm September morning at Old City Hall, with me, Stella and Stella’s husband, Joe, in attendance. Mrs. Carver wears a mauve linen sheath that I helped her pick out. Her bouquet is purple and white orchids. Afterwards, under a rented white tent in my back yard, there’s a reception for fifty people, including Suzanne, Katherine, Mr. Roberts and Alice Keystone, whom I haven’t seen or spoken to in years but who phoned only a week ago to announce that
she
had just got engaged, to a dog trainer, and because she said,“Oh, I used to just adore Mrs. Carver” (apparently the two of them met a few times, although I have no memory of it), I invited her.

She arrives bearing a large, zeppelin-shaped bundle under each arm. One bundle is wrapped in baby-blue tissue paper, the other in pink, and before I realize that they’re wedding gifts—blue for the groom, pink for the bride—I think that, whatever they are, they are meant to match her dress, which has a pattern of blue and pink watering cans.

“They’re bolsters,” she whispers. ‘You know, to support your back when you read in bed. I remember your father
was always such an avid reader. My mother made them, I only did the ‘His’ and ‘Hers’ stitching.”

“What a great idea,” I say. I laugh because it
is
a great idea, and who else would have thought of it? And because there she is, in her dress, with her flaming cheeks. “I’ve missed you,” I say, also truthfully.

Later, after everyone has gone and I’m sitting in the sun porch eating the last of the wedding cake, I feel an odd wistfulness. It takes me a while to figure out that the feeling is connected to Alice, her engagement. I wish her well, I’m in no hurry to get engaged myself, God knows. But we were fellow outcasts in high school, and now she has somebody to love, and I don’t.

Which must mean I want somebody to love. But do I? I’ve grown used to self-sufficiency. I know that loneliness will glide over you like a ghost if you keep still and quiet.

And yet, if I were to meet a man …

There’s a man who occasionally comes into the office to pick up his nephew, Peter, and give him a drive home. Peter stutters, except, I’ve noticed, when he’s talking to his uncle Matthew. I’ve overhead enough between the two of them to know that Matthew lives by himself and coaches Peter’s baseball team. He looks to be in his early-to-mid-thirties. Short and with a round, pleasant face. I caught him staring at me once.