All Saints (4 page)

 

“I lied to her,” he says to the sweater. “That's it, isn't it? I should have told her the truth when I had the chance. But I didn't.”

You can tell her the truth now. It's still dark. There's still time.

 

He woke up to the sound of someone knocking on the hotel-room door. He was still fully clothed, lying on top of the spread. He got up, confused by the light coming through the window. Stumbled to the door and opened it. It was the maid. Wondering if he was going to go down to breakfast, if she could come in and do up his room.

He grabbed his cell phone and turned it on. Ruth had called at six the evening before. Called and left no message. Six. Just when it would have been starting to get dark.

 

He gets up from his desk. Walks past the chair with the sweater on it. Goes to the bookcase. In the dim light the junk sculpture cross looks like a black and white photograph of itself. He puts his palms on the wall to either side of it and braces himself, leaning forward and hanging his head.

“Ruth,” he begins, “that time, when you tried to tell me you were sorry for screwing up my career, I should have let you talk. I should have heard you out and accepted your apology. And then I should have said, You're right, Ruth. You did screw up my career. You screwed it up good. Best thing you ever did, matter of fact. But you know something? It's okay. Because if it was between the church and you, there was no contest. Even with all the ups and downs and the craziness and the shit and the maxed-out credit cards, the church never stood a chance. I chose you, Ruth. And I'm glad. There. That's what my so-called career was about. And that's what I should have said to you. And I'm sorry I didn't. I'm sorry, Ruth. I'm sorry.”

He stays leaning against the wall, head down. Breathing through his mouth. Feeling the tears well and drop. Forcing himself to see her. To ask himself the questions.

Would she have heard the phone, if he had called back in time? Was she already out on the porch in that bitter cold, shivering under the quilt she had allowed herself, washing her pills down with the bottle of cabernet she had selected from their wine rack? And even if he had called and she had heard, would she have been capable of getting back inside the house?

Or did she sit and wait on the couch? The quilt folded beside her, the bottle and pills resting on it? Feeling, as the darkness deepened and the stars got sharp in the sky, his tacit permission sinking into her bones?

 

What was it about this woman? He had to take charge here. He was starting to feel ridiculously close to tears again.

“How about I start by touching base with you, Kelly? What brings you through the door of this place every Sunday?”

She had every right to remind him that she wasn't the one being interviewed. But she stopped writing and sat very still, her eyes on his desk blotter.

“It keeps me real.”

He wanted to prompt her—
real in what way
—but sensed that the answer was coming.

“I mean, I work with a lot of people who are a lot younger than me, okay? And they've all got their gadgets—their cell phones and their iPads and whatever everybody's just got to have this week. And that's what they talk about. Gadgets and clothes and TV. Even when I'm on the bus, I hear all the phones going off, and all the people flipping them open and saying,
Hi. I'm on the bus.
And I just get scared. And I'm not even sure what I'm scared of.”

She was silent. He waited, watching her mouth.

“It's just so easy to—I mean, I worshipped my ex. I did. He was everything. And then he left me for somebody else. And I felt like Alice for a while—you know? Falling and falling and never touching bottom? And you want to touch bottom. But at the same time you're scared of what bottom might be?”

Simon nodded. “Getting back to your word, real,” he said. “Are you saying that coming here saves you from worshipping false gods? I'm sorry. I shouldn't be putting words in—”

But she was nodding. “No, you've got it. I mean, I don't know if All Saints is the be-all and the end-all. But it's about something. And whatever that is, it's not going to be obsolete next week. And it's never going to dump me.”

 

Simon is back at his desk. The window behind him is turning pale. He sits and faces the sweater. Searches his memory for the end of the penitential rite.

“
Blessed are they whose transgressions are forgiven;”

“And whose sin is put away.”

“
The Lord has put away all your sins.”

He hesitates, then says, “Thanks be to God.”

“Go in peace, and pray for me a sinner.”

He smiles, imagining Kelly's embarrassment, the way she would wrinkle her nose over having to say that final line.

Kelly.

He gets up, goes around to the front of his desk and lifts the sweater off the back of the chair. Shakes it gently and folds it. Stands looking down at it in the growing light. It's as soft as ever in his hands. He raises it to his face. And still that hint of Ivory soap.

 

 

 

 

 

 

What They Have

 

 

 

 

 

They have two forks, two knives,
two spoons. She sneaked each utensil out of the residence cafeteria last term. “You're not stealing, Babe,” he told her. “You're taking back.”

It felt like stealing to her. She would sit alone, pretending to read. She would finish her soup, put her spoon down, then quickly drag it off the edge of the table and into her pocket. The next day, she would have a salad and do the same thing with the fork. Keeping her head down, letting her hair hide her face. Secretly proud of her new skill.

They have no plates or mugs or glasses yet. They've just been using whatever they find in communal kitchens. But now, she's thinking as she follows him to their latest address, they should get some of their own things. Mugs and plates, at least. Maybe a pot or two. A set of bowls.

They have her student loan. His part-time job at the music store. They'll manage.

They have a mattress, almost new, which a friend with a car has already delivered to the house. Both their pillows are his, from a former relationship. The first time she saw them, she thought of pillows in cartoons—grey-and-black striped, with bits of feather sticking out. She quickly covered them with the white-on-white embroidered pillowslips she had brought from home.

“There'll be sheets in the residence,” she had said when her mother showed her the set.

“They'll be like burlap. Here. Take these. Percale. Feel.”

They have his Hudson's Bay blanket, half an inch thick, with the trademark stripes. “All we'll need, Mama,” he'd told her, winking. He was right. She was used to Ontario winters. Here in Vancouver she hardly needs her coat.

They have their books, mostly hers, and their records, mostly his. Her unfinished poems and stories in a three-ring-binder. His harmonica, which he calls a harp. He plays it alongside his favourite blues albums, jerking his mouth back and forth, making a sound that reminds her of train whistles far off in the night.

 

He is seven years older than she is—old enough to have been a hippie, one of the originals living on Fourth Avenue. She saw hippies once, the summer she was fifteen, in Yorkville. Her mother insisted on keeping the car windows rolled up as they drove through on their way back to Willowdale because of the threat of hepatitis. A young man who looked like Jesus tucked a flower under their windshield wiper. A young girl in a long dress smiled at them and made the peace sign. Emily looked down into her lap, aware of her mother's eyes on her in the rearview. Her hand was making the peace sign back.

Now in bed she sometimes fingers the scar on his temple that he tells her he got from a police baton. His knuckles are scarred, too, from old fights. He still carries a knife. His features are sharp and fox-like, his voice light but flinty. The look in his eyes, except when they're resting on hers, is furtive.

Whenever she asks about his family, he says, “Babe, we gave up on each other years ago.” But he likes to hear about hers. The smallest detail tickles him. The Christmas hand towels her mother puts in the bathroom every December, red with white satin poinsettias edged in gold thread. They hang there for a month, never absorbing a single drop of water, then get put away dry until next year. Nothing is ever said, but everybody understands that you do not touch the Christmas hand towels.

“I'd touch ‘em, Babe.” Pretending to dry his armpits and groin.

When she asks him, he tells her about being on the street, collecting pop bottles and turning them in for money for food. Posing for art students. Doing a little dealing. Anything to survive. “End of nineteen sixty-eight, I weighed a hundred and twenty pounds.” That was just five years ago, but it gives him the air of a different generation, like someone who fought in a war she has only read about in textbooks.

Three times since they've been living together, she has wakened in the early morning while he was still asleep, has placed her hands on his shoulders and has thought,
Come here.
Three times—she has counted them—he has come to her in his sleep and has curled up small in her embrace, his beard pricking her breasts. Each time, the weight in her arms, the warmth of his head under her chin, has made a space hollow out under her breastbone. She has rocked him, yearning after his hungry younger self, wanting to feed him, willing him to sleep on and on, willing the morning to take its time.

 

This will be the third house they've lived in so far. Also the cheapest. As soon as they turn onto the street in East Van, Emily knows which one it is. She keeps hoping, as they walk up the dirt path through the weeds, that she's wrong, that Dave will stop, consult the piece of paper he scribbled the address on and shake his head. But she's right. This is the house. With the room in it that they're going to rent for twenty-five dollars a month. Which is half what they were paying in the last place. They're going through her student loan faster than she thought they would.

Stub.
That's the first word that comes into her mind. It's half the size of the surrounding houses and set far back from the sidewalk, as if withdrawing from the street.
Stump
. It isn't just small. It's chopped-off, mean-looking. Grey stucco that might have once been white. No shutters. No awnings. Porch steps made of cinder blocks that rock. “Careful, Mama,” Dave says, holding a hand out to her. There's no railing.
Runt.
Yes. That's the word for it, the one that sticks in her mind. The one she will write down in her three-ring binder.
The runt house.

 

For the rest of her life, she will have a recurring dream about the runt house. She will dream that she and Dave are back together, or maybe never apart in the first place. They're broke again, with no place to go. They find their way back to the runt house, but Rick is still there and won't let them in. So they wait till dark, then break in and creep down the basement steps to their old room. The basement is flooded again. This time, the water is up to their waists.

The dream will always leave her with an emotional hangover—a mix of relief and regret.
It's in the past,
she will remind herself.
You were only there for two months, for God's sake. Two months.

 

“This is Em,” Dave says to Rick once they're inside. Em is what he calls her when he isn't calling her Mama or Babe. She's not used to it yet. She's always been Emily. She likes the sound of
David and Emily
, but he insists on Dave. Dave and Em, then. Em sounds older and tougher than Emily. Em would have laughed when she first saw this house. Or shrugged.

Rick smiles down at her, takes her offered hand, then looks back at Dave and repeats, “Em,” as if fixing the name in his memory. Twice in the first week, he will call her Liz by mistake. The name of the former relationship. The one the pillows came from.

“And I'm Cass,” says a woman who has just come out of the kitchen. Rick's old lady, as Dave described her when he was telling Emily about their new living arrangements. “I'll be down in a minute to help you move in.” She jerks her head at the men. “Let these two get caught up.” Cass wears big swaying hoop earrings and glass bangles that clack up and down her forearms and a pendant in the shape of a cowbell that dings. Emily feels quiet and plain beside her, like a Quaker. When she extends her hand, Cass giggles, takes it and pulls her into an awkward hug. Her hair and clothes give off a sharp, sweet scent. Patchouli oil, Dave will explain later when they're alone.

“How old are your friends?” Emily will ask carefully.

“Same age as me. Give or take. Why?”

Twenty-seven just got closer to thirty. Rick has a bit of a paunch, and his hairline is receding. The hair he does have is shoulder-length like Dave's, but he's clean-shaven. Not even long sideburns. She always thinks that makes a man look odd. Almost womanish. And Cass has one of those prematurely old faces—hook-nosed and small-eyed. Her hair is dyed a bright red, with grey roots. It looks like it might take off from her head without the green paisley bandana tying it down.

She's being judgemental again. Getting hung up on the age difference between her and Dave. It shouldn't matter. Her father's five years older than her mother. And her mother was nineteen—a whole year younger than she is now—when she got engaged to him. Not that she and Dave are engaged, or anything like that.

 

“Whatever you do, don't fall in love with him.” Cass says this out of the side of her mouth, with one eyebrow cocked. Emily suspects it's how she says most things. “I mean, Dave's a hell of a lot of fun. So yeah, have a good time. But don't even think about a cottage small by a waterfall, or anything like that.”

Emily makes herself smile. Goes on folding socks and underwear and putting them in the top drawer of the dresser.
I don't remember asking for your advice.
That's one thing she could say. Another is,
Don't believe everything Rick tells you about him and Dave in the old hippie days.
But she says nothing.

Cass is helping her get settled in the basement room while Rick and Dave have a beer together in the kitchen. Every now and then there's a burst of hard laughter from above. She's never heard Dave laugh quite that way before.

She has just gotten off the phone with her mother. She wanted to call from the house, but Rick said no. No long-distance calls. Suppose the bill comes weeks later, he said, and whoever made the call has moved out or gone broke? Who's going to pay for it? She turned to Dave, who shrugged. Rick was their landlord. Sort of. So she lugged a fistful of coins to a payphone down the street.

“Don't call,” was all her mother said, once she had heard about the house and about Dave. “Just don't call again. Not while you're—living the way you are.”

Cass is jangling coat hangers in the closet at the end of the room. “Tell you what,” she says, fingering the sleeve of one of Emily's nylon blouses. “I'm really into fabrics. I can show you where you can get stuff that's a little more—you know—funky?” Crinkling her nose over the word and grinning.

Emily takes a deep breath.
Careful. Don't burn your bridges.
She closes the top drawer of the dresser and opens the next one down. No mouse droppings in here either. Well. That's something. There were baited mousetraps in the hall upstairs.
Beggars can't be choosers.
She makes herself smile again. Says, “Let's go shopping some time.”

When Cass is finally gone, she spreads the Hudson's Bay blanket out on the mattress and plumps both of Liz's pillows inside the percale pillowslips that her mother gave her. Then she sits down on the bed, draws her knees up and buries her face in her arms. Upstairs, she hears the two men laughing again.

She could have said no when Dave came up to her at the end of that Survey of World Literature 110 class and asked if she wanted to go someplace for a coffee. And before that, she could have given in to her mother's wails—
There are schools that aren't thousands of miles away, you know!
Stayed home and gone to U of T. Ridden the bus back and forth every day. Eaten supper every night at her old place at the table between her parents. Gone on sleeping in her childhood bed.

But she didn't. And this is her bed now.
The bed you've made for yourself
, as her mother would say. All her mother's favourite sayings have been going round and round in her head since the phone call.

The thing to do, the thing
Em
would do, is treat this as an adventure. Something to write about. Something to laugh about one day with Dave—
Remember the runt house?

 

The room Dave and Em are renting is built on top of a wooden platform. This puzzles Em until the basement floods for the first time. It floods three times in the two months they live there. Each time, they have to stop near the bottom of the basement stairs, take off their shoes and socks and wade through instep-deep water to their room. Em hangs one of their towels on a nail just inside the door so they can dry their feet.

The walls of their room are painted green. Em supposes that if the lighting was better, she might be able to name the shade of green. But the first time she pulls the string that's knotted to the chain that jerks on the bare forty-watt bulb in the ceiling, she just stands there staring. It's sort of a military green, she tells herself finally. Whether it's closer to the green of camouflage or of heavy artillery, she can never decide.

Their room is tiny, with no window. They have the choice of crawling across their mattress or inching sideways around the edges of it to get to the closet at one end and the dresser at the other. The closet door is constructed of open slats, like a fence, and is held shut with a hooked latch. They bunch their clothes together in the middle to keep them from touching the walls, which are always damp. During floods, the dresser drawers swell up and screech whenever they're opened or shut.

Rick and Cass's bedroom is on the main floor. The kitchen, bathroom and living room are theoretically communal. But because Rick has arranged this fantastic deal for them and rooms are scarce and he could be charging them a lot more than he is, the shared spaces are, by unspoken agreement, just a little bit more his and Cass's. Which is why he and Cass can hang their towels in the bathroom, but Em and Dave have to carry theirs back and forth from the basement. And why Rick and Cass can jam-pack the freezer and take up most of the fridge with their food. And why they can leave dirty dishes in the sink, but if Em and Dave do the same thing, they hear, “Hey. Guys? Like, I don't want to come on heavy, but … ”