The Romantic (37 page)

He comes into the office the following Friday. Just as he and Peter are about to leave, I ask if he’s looking forward to the weekend.

“I sure am,” he says. “How about you?”

“I don’t have anything planned.”

“She could come watch my baseball game,” says Peter.

So that’s our first date: me watching him coach Peter’s baseball team in a tournament. He could hardly have contrived anything to put himself in a more attractive light: the hearty, reassuring leader of young boys. Who is no less hearty or reassuring when they lose.

On our second date, at a French restaurant, I learn that he’s an accountant who “came this close” to being married once. “It wasn’t meant to be,” he says easily. I am warmed by his optimism and by how his eyes soften when we talk about Peter, and yet, by dessert, it’s clear that there won’t be a third date. “I can’t believe it,” he says after I admit that Peter’s tournament was not only the first game of baseball I’d ever sat through but the first game of sports, period. He says,“You mean to tell me you never rooted for your high-school football team?” He sounds truly puzzled. What I find unbelievable is that the only books he owns are
Ask a Handyman
and
The World Almanac of Natural Disasters.

The next morning I say to Katherine,“It wasn’t a complete fiasco. At least I could feel myself
hoping
to be won over.”

“Maybe it’s still too early,” she says.

‘You mean, I’m not over Abel? No, I’m over him, I think.”

“Do you still love him?”

“I’ll always love him. I don’t expect to see him again, I don’t even want to see him again. And I don’t think he’s the only man I’ll ever love, either. But I don’t just
love
him, the way you love an old friend. There’s more to it than that.”

As I’m speaking I imagine holding my hand a few inches
above a boulder. It’s twilight, summer, growing cool. The boulder gives off the heat of the day. My love for Abel is like the heat between the boulder and the falling night. That feeling, or that place.

Eleven months later, out of the blue, I get a call from Mr. Richter. I can tell something is wrong by his hello. I think it’s Mrs. Richter, that she has died.

It’s Abel. Last night, alone in his apartment, he started vomiting blood. By the time the ambulance arrived he was going into shock. He is stable now.

“I know that the two of you have lost touch with each other,” Mr. Richter says,“but his mother thinks a visit from you would do him good.”

As soon as I enter the hospital room, Mrs. Richter bursts into tears. Mr. Richter helps her to her feet and the three of us go out into the corridor.

“How is he?” I ask. I only got a glimpse.

“Sleeping,” Mr. Richter says. He thanks me for coming. Mrs. Richter clings to my arm. We walk a little way down the corridor and then Mr. Richter gets straight to the point. He says that Abel has cirrhosis of the liver. “Because Abel is so young,” he says,“the doctors think that his liver must have been damaged to begin with.” He speaks gently, as if he were the presiding physician. “Anyway, the cirrhosis itself isn’t the problem right now. It’s the ulcers he has developed in his stomach, which the drinking makes worse. Sometimes they rupture, and that is what happened last night.”

“He could have died,” Mrs. Richter sobs.

She is too distraught to return to the room. “Why don’t you sit with him, Louise?” says Mr. Richter. “We will go to the cafeteria.”

The chair Mrs. Richter vacated is still warm. I thought he would be yellow and drawn but he looks wonderful with his white face and long wavy hair, his serene expression. I take his hand. It’s cold. He opens his eyes. “Louise,” he says, and the hardness in me, what remained of it after the phone call, the clot of resistance that got me here dry eyed, just evaporates.

In some ways, the year of trying to save him is much easier than the years of trying to forget him and the months of trying to hold on to him. Those times I was alone. All I had for a lure was myself. Whereas everybody he knows wants to save him, and the lure, this time, is the whole world.

At first, he doesn’t oppose us. He checks himself into the Marwood Clinic. Despite relapsing, he continues to go to twice-weekly meetings for another three months. The reason he stops going is not clear, something to do with his counsellor quitting. “If he would only come home,” Mrs. Richter says,“we could watch over him.” Which is exactly why he won’t go home. He stays on in the basement apartment where he has been living ever since the rooming house sold in the spring of 1975. At around the same time, the piano bar at the hotel closed down, and that’s when he started driving a taxi. Does he ever drive drunk? I ask him this while he’s still in the hospital; I think it’s a question that needs to be asked. He says no, and I find I believe him. For one thing, I realize that he wouldn’t risk anybody else’s life. What he likes about the job, he says, is that he can set his own hours and travel all over the city, meeting new people, hearing their stories. He’s thinking of writing some of the stories down. He sounds hopeful.

But then he always sounds hopeful. When he quits
driving, and then when he starts spending almost all day in bed, he claims to be catching up on his reading, learning to meditate. “Everything is fine,” he says up until the day he dies.

On my birthday I stop in to see him before going out to dinner with Suzanne. He has a gift for me. Some small thing he has wrapped, without tape, in a page torn from one of his books.

“A rock,” I say, feeling it. I unwrap it, and it
is
a rock. “Just what I always wanted.”

“It’s a meteorite,” he says.

I look at it more closely. It’s black and rust coloured. Glossy.

“A piece of the solar system,” he says. I reach for his hand and kiss it. “Where did you get it?”

“I bought it.”

“Really?” I didn’t think he had the strength to go any farther than across the street to the liquor store. “Years ago,” he says.

I look at the torn-out page. It’s Rimbaud’s “Romance.” All four stanzas. “At last,” I say.

“‘You’re in love,’ “he says, quoting from it. “Your sonnets make her laugh. All your friends disappear.’ “And then he coughs and a jet of blood lands on my lap. “Oh, God.” I jump up. “Oh, God.”

“Sorry.” He wipes his mouth with a handkerchief.

The blood slides down my skirt. “Let’s go to the hospital,” I say.

“I’ll clean it up,” he says, coming to his feet.

“For God’s sake, Abel! This is an emergency!”

He stands there looking at the floor, waiting for me to calm down. “
I’ll
clean it,” I say and head for the bathroom.

When I come back out, he’s on his hands and knees, dabbing a sponge at a spot on the carpet. I sit on the bed. Every few seconds he separates the fibres with his fingers, then gets back to dabbing. He bites his lip. His arms shake. I should probably take over except I’ve fallen into a kind of stupor where I seem to be watching him as though he were a stranger in a movie. Who is he? Why is he so thin and pale?

He glances up. “It’s better to get it out right away,” he says, and a feeling of pure, ungrasping compassion comes over me for this skeletal human being who is still trying so hard to protect everyone from himself. Not from his claims; he never made those. From his detachment. It occurs to me that the distance I seem to be holding him at right now is the one he has always maintained between himself and the rest of the world. How else do you preserve the illusion that the people you love are perfect? Or that you can bear to let them go?

“I’m sorry,” I say. Sorry for the way things are, naturally, but as I speak I’m wondering, why is it that, between us, I got all the anger? I can’t believe I sent him that letter.

He stops dabbing and gives me a tender look. “I’m fine now,” he says. “Everything’s fine.”

I nod.

“You’ll be fine, too.”

“I know.”

I leave at about nine o’clock. Some time over the next three hours he takes off his clothes, gets a blanket, a bottle of whisky and a bottle of tranquilizers and goes to the roof
of his apartment building. It’s a clear night. Lots of stars. He drinks the whisky and swallows the pills, then lies on the blanket.

He is found a little after midnight by Archie, the superintendent, who wondered why the door to the transformer, which is the same door leading to the roof, was ajar.

“Always on May eleventh the weather is beautiful,” Mrs. Richter declares.

“Is that true?” Mr. Richter says, sounding astonished. He drives below the speed limit, sitting very straight.

“Always,” she says firmly. “Always on Abel’s birthday.”

We are on our way to the ravine to scatter his ashes. The funeral was so crowded that at least a hundred people had to stay out on the church lawn, but today there are only the three of us. Mrs. Richter holds the box, not an urn but a carved wooden box. I have the three green plastic bowls that I bought yesterday at Zellers: green, his favourite colour, plastic because the glass ones were too heavy. We have rolled the windows down, it’s so warm … already, at only nine o’clock in the morning. Spring has come early this year, the forsythia blossoms finished, the big hardwood trees in leaf. Abel used to keep charts of when the leaves of certain trees opened. This year I have found myself keeping a mental note. Horse chestnuts: April fifteenth. Maple saplings: April sixteenth. Oaks: April twenty-ninth.

At the top of the ravine, there’s a small paved lot, empty at this hour. We set the bowls on the hood of the car and Mrs. Richter pours out the ashes.

“So,” says Mr. Richter, who has never been here before. “The famous ravine.”

But not the ravine it was. A six-lane highway now cuts through it about a quarter of a mile to the east of the river, roughly following the river’s course. The sludge factory is gone. Camp Wanawingo has been turned into a grassy area that the city supplies with picnic benches and garbage pails. This walk down, however, is much the same, with the wooded slopes rising up steep as walls. On the eastern slope the white bloodroot flowers are like little jagged cups. A brown butterfly flickers above them.

“Look!” Mrs. Richter cries. “What kind is that?”

“A mourning cloak,” Mr. Richter says.

“Ah,” she says.

We stop and watch it. Are they thinking it’s Abel, or a sign from Abel? I say,“If you want, you could start here.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Richter says, smiling at me,“let’s get started.” She goes over to the flowers and throws a handful of ash as if she were broadcasting seed. Mr. Richter goes to the other slope. He looks at it a moment, then selects a silver birch and carefully distributes a bracelet of ash around the trunk. I wait; I want to save mine for the cave. Because I knew I’d be climbing, I’ve worn running shoes and blue jeans. Mr. Richter wears a black suit. Mrs. Richter is all in red and orange—red skirt, orange shawl, a red bandanna around her head. You’d think she was on her way to a carnival, and it’s true that her mood seems gay. She hums and sways her hips, moving down the path.

I point out where the sumach grove is, having told them in the car that it was one of his favourite spots. Then I head for the cave. “Take your time,” Mr. Richter calls after me. “We’ll meet you back at the car.”

I’ve brought a Swiss Army knife, but the nettles have died back and I climb up easily. How many years has it been? Fourteen. Fifteen. Bars of sunlight spread across the ledge and into the cave’s mouth. I let myself imagine that they’re a sign from the Angel of Love, who, not unexpectedly, hasn’t appeared since before Abel died. I take a step inside. Without even looking up I know that the bats are gone. I go farther in. The spears are gone, too.

I start scattering the ashes. What do I feel? A heaviness of heart. I had hoped to feel something more, to have a revelation, but the things that occur to me have occurred to me a hundred times before. His excruciating sensitivity to the physical world. His rapturous dreams. His guilt and anguish over the death of the baby bat. His dread of interfering and of choosing. But why did he have these feelings in the first place? Why was he who he was?

I go back out onto the ledge and turn the bowl over, letting the wind take what’s left. I look for the Richters. After a moment I see them heading toward the river. I’d better go down, they might lose their way. They seem to get confused a lot lately. It doesn’t strike me as a sign of age, though. They’re like children, expressing amazement at the most casual news, stopping to stare, as if everything they’ve gone through has made the world more scenic.

The three of us eat an early lunch at the Greenwoods shopping centre. Over coffee Mrs. Richter asks where my mother’s ashes are, and I am forced to admit that I haven’t scattered them yet.

“Oh, Louise,” she says,“it’s time.”

Back home, after they drop me off, I go down to the basement and retrieve the urn from behind a bunch of old paint cans and bring it upstairs. I suppose I could just throw the ashes in my rose garden. But they’re red roses and I think she liked only white. I can’t remember.

I carry the urn outside and look around the lawn and this I
do
remember: her arguing with my father that it would be better to have stone courtyards, you don’t have to mow stones. I start walking up to Queen Street, toward the stores. Melba’s Fashions, Lila’s Beauty Salon. But when I get there I wonder what I could have been thinking. I can’t just throw the ashes on the sidewalk for everyone to tramp on, and nobody’s going to let me scatter them
inside
the stores.

I head east along Queen. I enter Kew Gardens. It’s sdii a gorgeous day, more like late June. I walk past people lying on blankets, past the purple and yellow petunia beds, the tennis courts. None of this would have appealed to her. I reach the crowded boardwalk. She hated crowds. What about the beach? We never went to the beach. I imagine her looking at the sand and seeing only dirt, looking at the sun-bathers and seeing only fat. I go to the shore and consider the blue lake, the blue sky, white seagulls lounging on air currents. What would her objection to this have been? Oh, the water’s polluted, the seagulls are vicious.