The usual library crowd: a few welfare mothers; this young couple with their first kid; a history buff with his cane and his Nazi belt buckle. I was no better than any of them. I’d scammed a research grant from the city, a story I’d fed the Archives Development Committee about the opium trade, links to early families, pioneer wives in particular. Sexy stuff. I talked about spin-offs, tours of Chinatown. Interactive stations. That was the word I used: stations. Even some poems set in concrete. Poems! Six months rent plus expenses, a year if they liked it. Ended up I never wrote a word, at least none they could use.
It was after lunch. I’d grabbed a gyro at Eugene’s, and it was coming back on me. The line to check out books was a long one. I hated the idea of losing my place just to use the washroom, but it was either that or ruin everybody’s day. There’s something wrong with my pyloric valve. The doctor explained it to me once: the flap at the back of my throat that keeps all the acid and food and enzymes down doesn’t work. I should’ve known Greek was a bad idea. It was a year of bad ideas. I had pretty much made up my mind to lose my dinner down the toilet when my first girlfriend walked by.
Puke was crawling up the back of my throat. The bathroom was on the second floor. My old girlfriend was flipping through CDs, the classical music she never used to like. I left my books on the counter and ran up some stairs, past people reading local papers and down an aisle of stacks I thought would never end.
The bathroom door’s hydraulic closer was broken, and, as I slammed it open, I was thinking I might not make it to the toilet in time and how it was twenty years since I’d last seen her and what a pain it would be to have to look up those books all over again, when BAM, the door hit the tiled wall and the noise nearly blew out my ears. What the guy in the first cubicle was thinking, I couldn’t say. A dinner that took ten minutes to eat flew out of my mouth in less than thirty seconds. I was washing my hands when he finally left the safety of his stall.
“You all right?” he asked
“I am now,” I said.
But of course I wasn’t. I threw a bit of water on my face and slicked some through my hair and walked out the door and back along the stacks to the top of the stairs. First girlfriends are a kind of religion with most men I know. Something sacred. A dream they never stop having. It was no different with me. I was looking down from the mezzanine where she was flipping through the bins of music, and my two hands gripped the banister like it was the guardrail of a bridge and I was working up the courage to throw myself over. There ought to be some kind of electric current in the air that prevents a person from running into past lovers, the way some homeowners have wireless electric fences to keep their dogs from wandering into the road and getting killed by a passing truck. A hundred volts right through the collar and into the dog’s neck every time it tries to poke its dumb nose out of the yard. I could see how something like that would come in handy for a man in my situation, except maybe they should wrap the dog’s collar around the man’s dick instead of his neck.
My books were still sitting on the librarian’s desk. I could just walk down the stairs and check them out and leave. Keep my head down, eyes on my own business. She probably wouldn’t recognize me, anyway. Twenty years was a long time for both of us. Even from where I stood, I could see the grey in her hair, how she was having second thoughts about hiding it, the colour growing out.
People can say what they want about artists and grants and the public purse, but the truth is nobody gets rich. At best, I can swear off part-time shifts at the liquor store for a while. No pressure to take sessional work this term at the college, either. Other than that, not much changes. Rent gets paid, groceries get bought. And I can keep thinking of myself as a journalist, a local historian, someone whose two university degrees weren’t a total waste. I didn’t use to think this way, but what a person is at any given moment rarely has to contend with what he once was. He forgets. I’ve always thought of myself as a mole, the kind of creature that digs his way in the dark, pushing the dirt behind him as he goes. The past gets buried. Unless it walks right by.
More school was the last thing on my mind when I was with Christine, and that was what was so hard to remember. By hard I mean painful, the sort of pain those high school years always seem to carry for people once they’re past thirty, what it feels like to remember a time when days flipped by one after the other like a deck of cards with a thousand suits. We were together until we were eighteen – though, really, she was nineteen. Sometimes she made me feel how critical those extra nine months were, and that’s part of why we didn’t last. It seemed like she was always waiting for me to catch up to her, or at least that’s how I remember it.
Anyone who’s put his fingers around the handle of a fire alarm will know what I was feeling, the urge to be perverse, to see how easily a normal day could crumble to shit. Or not. Isn’t that the dream? Turn back the clock?
I kissed my research good-bye and walked down the stairs to the music department, an arm’s length from where she was standing. The idea was for her to turn to me and make the connection, but things didn’t work out the way I planned. I’d say they never do, but that would make me sound depressive, which I’m not. I’m just realistic. I could have stood there all night waiting for her to look my way, and the novelty of coincidence was wearing off as I watched. Funny gear she was wearing. Layers, a long dress with a pair of black silky trousers underneath. Nothing franchised. No brand names showing, elegant. The shoes added height which she didn’t need, but they looked good, too. I never need much to recognize someone, the tip of a nose, a chin, a hand holding a glass. This was overkill. She was reading liner notes like they were some kind of code, encrypted instructions to whatever it is middle-aged women dream about. Like I would know. Patience was never my long suit, so I coughed and looked over at her.
“Hey!” I said. The tone of surprise in my voice was as genuine as I could make it.
“Dennis,” she said, after a glance in my direction. “I was wondering when you’d get up the courage to walk over here.”
“You saw me?”
“An hour ago. You were sitting at the microfiche talking to yourself.”
“It’s a bad habit,” I said.
“An old one, too.”
“All my habits are old ones,” I said. It was a little disappointing not to have had the effect I was hoping for. Made sense, though. She was a sharp one, always had been. In one way, I was even a little more excited. It was a crazy thought, but isn’t there some part in every guy that says maybe he can get back in with a woman, any woman, no matter what he’s done in the past, no matter what bridge he’s burned? I asked if she wanted to get some coffee, but she said she didn’t have a lot of time. She didn’t say why, but she didn’t have to. Married people have a look about them, like basketball players who decide it’s time to become a coach. Married people also wear rings, and hers was a big one. So, we walked over to an empty reading room and sat on one of the couches by a window. The rain outside was streaking the glass, and the radiators underneath the sill were pumping out heat. It was the closest to cozy I’d felt in years.
When I see high-school girls now, they all seem beautiful in a kind of wholesome and clean way, but my eyes have changed. Anyone young looks good now, and by good I mean pure, unspoiled, no matter how sexy the girl thinks she looks. It didn’t use to be that way. The first time I saw Christine, it felt like a crime just to be staring. We were on the third floor of our high school, and she did nothing more than walk down the hall with a couple of friends. Just walked, one foot in front of another, but she crippled me. It was her graduating year, and I still had one to go. After that I looked for her everywhere. I wanted to speak to her, get her attention somehow, but the words I thought of saying to her sounded moronic. They were moronic. Whatever motives a kid like me had for speaking to a girl like that –- beauty, romance, love –- there was really only one reason and it was sex. Part of me knew that, and I hated that scene, the sports talk that reduced girls to pieces of meat, something to be fucked and forgotten. Ask me about it now, and I’d say so what? That’s the way things are. But I was a bit of a prig back then. I wanted my life to be “different.” Not an original idea, I know. Knew it then, too. In fact I’d heard it in a film I’d seen, something with Dustin Hoffman or Robert Redford. Like I said, it was a long time ago. One day, the pointlessness got to be too much for me, and when Christine walked past this time I banged my head on the wall just the way my film hero did. It was the gesture of a desperate mind, but it worked.
“It’s good to see you,” I said.
“You, too,” she said. “I’ve been away a long time.”
“I never thought it would happen,” I said. “Not like this. I’d sort of imagined running into you somewhere else. I wondered what happened to you, what you were up to, but I never thought it would be here. I was thinking an airport or a French restaurant. A restaurant in France, I mean.”
“This is a better bet,” she said. “I don’t eat out that much, and I hate flying.”
“I remember.”
“We never flew anywhere together, did we?”
“No, but you were afraid of heights,” I said. “Did you ever think you’d run into me in a library?”
“I guess I thought I would run into you somewhere, especially now I’m back, but that’s about as far as it went.”
I had no idea what she was implying by that, but in the years we were together, she’d always held her cards pretty close to her chest. Inscrutable was a word I didn’t know back then. I remember the time someone first told me what it meant, though, and I immediately thought of her. To see her again like this was a strange experience, a kind of real-time hallucination. For a few moments, it was as though I was talking to someone who was impersonating Christine, someone who had her mannerisms, her way of speaking. There were creases I’d never seen before, and the folds of flesh around her throat were something that would have horrified me at sixteen. But after a while my eyes adjusted to the years, and time just kind of rolled back. She was the same. She was beautiful. Of course, while I was looking at her, I was wondering what she saw when she looked at me. Was there any magic stripping away the wrinkles from my face, filling in the missing hair?
“So,” she said. “Is this a regular thing?”
“It’s a living,” I said.
“Reading?” she said. “Must be nice.”
“Research,” I said. “I’m a writer.”
“Christ,” she said, “who isn’t in this town?”
“Ouch!”
“But, really,” she said. “Does anybody have a real job here? All I hear about are writing retreats, evening courses in writing, weekend workshops for amateurs. It’s an industry.”
“A harmless one.”
“I think it’s repulsive, all these people putting their sorry little lives on paper.”
“They have to dream,” I said.
“Why don’t they do something useful? It’s all so narcissistic. I know you work in the business, and maybe that’s a different thing, but all this navel gazing depresses me.”
“You haven’t changed,” I said.
“Now, I’m really depressed.”
“I mean it. You never could stand self-centred people.”
“You weren’t self-centred.”
“Everyone’s self-centred,” I said. “Some people just hide it better.”
A difference of a year in high school is a big deal, especially when the girl is the older one. These days the younger guy thing is all the rage, but that’s more about sex and performance. If she’s fifty, she wants forty. If she’s forty, she wants thirty. If she’s thirty, thirty will do for a while. But any teenage boy can deliver the goods. Truth is, they perform a little too well. Like nitro-glycerine. Even a look will set them off.
I was working late shifts at a hotel restaurant, as a busboy first and, when I knew more, a waiter. The shift would finish around midnight and I would drive my scooter by Christine’s house on the way home. She had a room in the basement and her own private entrance, which she’d leave unlocked. I’d turn the engine off and roll down the street to her house. If there was a light on, it was okay to come in. But sometimes she’d fall asleep waiting for me and I’d have to wake her up. This would have been okay, except she was a bit of a somnambulist, more a sleeptalker than sleepwalker, but it still meant she was out of it. She would sit up, eyes open and gab away for an hour and not remember a thing about it the next day. At first, I thought she was lying, but after a while I could tell when she wasn’t all there. Maybe it was because of what she was reading before I arrived, but her sentences sounded as though they came from a novel, something from the 19th century, one of those morality tales by Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy.
“Hey, Chris,” I’d say. “Wake up.”
And she’d open her eyes and say something like, “I am no more asleep than you, my good fellow, so I advise you not to try to take advantage of the situation.”
The following September, Christine went to the local college and I was stuck in high school. It was a bad time for both of us. Friends thought I was a big man on campus because I was dating a girl in first year, but they didn’t know the grief a situation like that could bring. I was worried all the time.
“You have no idea how kinky things were in this town back in the day.”
I was telling Christine about the project I was working on. As lame as it all turned out to be, I was pretty excited about some of the stories I was finding. “This place was the drug capital of the west coast for a while,” I told her. “There are tunnels under half the streets of downtown.”
“You make it sound glamorous,” she said.
“That’s my job,” I said, “but opium was their Ecstasy. There were a lot of rich men with very bored wives”
“The streets were just like our streets,” she said. “Things weren’t any more romantic back then than they are now. Look a little harder. You’ll see.”
“Maybe so,” I said, “but history’s not about the victims. It’s about the makers and shakers. These people on the street today, the junkies, the crackheads, nobody’s going to remember them.”
“And that’s why things never change.”
I’d forgotten how hard Christine could be, how little patience she had for popular culture, the music that was so important for everyone when we were growing up, the musicians and their sordid lives. She hated the whole cult of personality, the way people focused on things that didn’t matter. But it didn’t stop there.
“Frivolous shit,” she said one day after coming home from an art history lecture. I’d dropped by after school on my way to work. “Like one man’s suicide is worse than another’s.” She tore down every poster from her wall and stuffed them in the garbage. She wouldn’t even let me rescue the ones I’d always liked.
“You touch those and we’re through,” she said.
I couldn’t see the big deal, but the posters stayed where they were. I said I’d come back later, but she didn’t hear me. My big worry was all the older guys in her classes at the college. Any idiot could see it wouldn’t be long before one of them would get her in his sights. With any woman, it’s a question of access, and I didn’t have as much as I wanted. Two people hang around each other long enough, they begin to take notice. Proximity, that’s all any relationship is in the end. Love the one you’re with.
Sex holds things together, at least for a while. I knew that much. And I was working on it with Christine. Virginity seems quaint now. Kids these days have sex before they’re out of elementary school. For me it was a bit of a curse, and I was doing my best to be rid of it. Some nights we came pretty close, too, the sort of thing you’re supposed to laugh about years later, but it never seemed funny to me. There was some kind of battle going on, and we were both fighting it. I wanted to win so badly, but sometimes right in the middle of it she would look at me, as though she was saying, Okay. I give up. Is that what you want? Because I can’t do this any more. And I’d get scared, call a halt and head home on my scooter. If the night was a warm one, I wouldn’t wear my helmet and the air would blow the scent of her from my hair, my face. The next morning, though, I could still smell her on me, and I’d feel like shit, like I’d worked a double shift while I was asleep. I suppose what I couldn’t bear was the thought that she would give it up with someone else, that whoever he was would take her at her word when she finally threw in the towel.
The rain was coming down outside, and whoever it was Christine was supposed to be meeting seemed less of a priority. She was getting animated, and I was looking for a way to change the subject.
“What about yourself?” I said. “Why did you come back here?”
“My mother,” she said. “She could use a little help now. There was a ministry posting and I applied for it.”
“Good benefits?” I asked.
“People say they are,” she said.
“Hey,” I said. “Why didn’t you say hello right away, when I was looking through that microfilm? Why did you wait?”
“Just coming across each other like that after so long. I wasn’t even sure it was you for a while. But then I could see it was. It was a shock.”
“It occurred to me I could just leave and you’d never know.”
“But I would have,” she said.
“And what did you mean by ‘getting up the courage to come over? That’s a hell of a thing to say to someone.”
“You were pretty fucked up back then. So was I. We didn’t really leave on the best of terms.”
“People break up,” I said. “It wasn’t the end of the world.”
“For a while I thought it was,” she said.
I don’t remember if it was the night she threw out the posters, but in my head it was. One night not long after that, anyway. It had been frantic at work. Summer service, four sittings a night. I couldn’t concentrate and it showed. I’d get table numbers mixed up in my head, confuse the orders, and every time I went to call Christine, the line was busy. Women have told me I’ve got radar for this sort of thing, but I think that’s a crock. It’s not radar, it’s just fear, and ninety percent of the time, what you’re afraid of comes true. Turns out I was wrong on the specifics, but it would have happened sooner or later.
I came by late and her light was on. She wasn’t asleep, or at least her eyes weren’t closed.
“I tried phoning you,” I said.
“There is no end to the annoyance I am feeling right now,” she said, and I knew she was gone.
Normally, I wouldn’t have tried anything when she was in a state like that, but I started in anyway. I needed a little reassurance, but what I was looking for was revenge. I wanted a piece of what she was going to take away from me. It’s hard to say whether she knew what was going on, but any woman I’ve asked since – and I always ask – has said it’s impossible to sleep through sex, no matter how bad it is. If sex is what you’d call it. I looked down afterwards, and the mess I’d made was all mine, but that didn’t mean anything. It was how I felt about it that mattered. Christine’s eyes were closed, and there was a kind of smile on her face. It annoyed me, as though she knew something I didn’t, something I’d never know. Then I said goodbye. If she said anything back, I didn’t hear it.
I stayed away for almost two weeks after that night. What if she were pregnant? I had no idea how things like that worked, but it seemed from what I could remember that I’d done exactly what I had set out to do. The idea kept me awake at night, and there’s no better solution to a problem than running from it. The next time I saw her, it was clear she had done a little sabotage of her own, by which I mean she stared right through me for the five minutes we kept the conversation going.
Whatever lunch I’d had was well on its way down the sewer, and I knew I would have to work late to make up for all the research that was probably back in the stacks by now. I asked if she wanted to get something to eat, and she said she could use a walk.
“There really is somewhere I have to be,” she said.
“Sure,” I said. “Just a walk. In the rain. We used to do things like that, didn’t we?”
“Your memory must be better than mine,” she said.
Except the rain had let up by this point, so we headed down toward the park and the duck ponds. It was a novelty just to be outside, something I never did unless I needed to find a bus stop or a supermarket or a bar. This was November, so there were no cherry blossoms, no flowers to scent the air. Government workers had lined up outside one of the downtown pubs, happy it was Friday, smoking their way into the weekend. I was thinking there was a good chance I had walked down this street with Christine before, probably on our way to the park, too. It’s a small town. The odds were good. How strange would that be, I was thinking. Flick a switch and twenty years disappear, a bad splice in a film. I’d say it was like a dream, only I don’t remember dreams. The streets hadn’t changed all that much. Christine’s long strides pushed us along at a pace I had almost forgotten, and there was some kind of adolescent gravity about us that I recognised, about the walk, its purpose, like we were going to break up all over again, even though we hadn’t seen each other in decades. We were passing behind the hotel I used to work in, the town’s signature landmark, an ugly jumble of brick and copper and ivy.
“Fucked up how?” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Those were your words. I wondered what you meant.”
“Come on, Dennis. That was years ago. We were kids.”
“Kids don’t feel like kids. At least I didn’t.”
“Sex changes people, that’s all. Boys were like vampires, one minute so normal and the next completely out of control. Like they couldn’t help themselves. After a while I just felt sorry for them.”
“You must have gotten over it eventually,” I said.
“How so?”
I pointed to her hand. “That’s a big ring. Hard not to notice something like that.”
She held out her hand. “It’s my mother’s. I’ve worn it for years. She gave it to me when my dad left, said it would keep away evil spirits. She was joking, but it’s amazing what kind of effect it has on men. They just back right off.”
I should have twigged earlier, back at the library. No children, nobody pulling at her skirt, telling her to get on with it. Everything about her said handfuls: public library, alone, borrowing music anybody with a decent income would buy. Clothes that had come off some rack second hand. Our roads hadn’t been so different after all.
“There are some men who wouldn’t.”
“You for one.”
“I know you. It’s different.”
“Sometimes, the ones you know are the worst.”
I turned a little to look at her. It was hard to tell if she’d directed her words at me or if she was just talking. Her head tilted down a bit as she walked, and she’d pulled her coat in tight to her body. There was no real way of knowing without asking her.
“Have you ever taken it off?” I asked.
“A few times.”
“But it’s back on now,” I said.
“Maybe for good,” she said.
Under the streetlights, the sidewalk seemed to smoke a little, as though there was a warm world underneath. I was thinking how stupid to take her to the park. The ducks were all asleep and the woods were black. My stomach was so empty, it hurt.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s not as bad as all that,” she said. “Look at you. You’re doing all right.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I said.
She stopped and looked at me. “Well,” she said. Then she glanced at her watch and said she really had to go. We made a promise to meet again for a longer chat over dinner or lunch, but I knew it would never happen. It sounded good at the time, but people rarely mean what they say. The things they hope for are the things they know will never come true.
That morning, I couldn’t sleep after coming home from her house. The grey sky turned to blue outside my window. A dog up the street wouldn’t stop barking. I had to be at school in a couple of hours, and the thought of it – the teachers, their scribblings and deadlines and reading assignments, everybody writing everything down as though they cared. Even then I knew all I had to do was pick up the phone and call her.
Tags: short fiction, short stories, Terence Young