All Saints (5 page)

Rick and Cass's bedroom is right off the living room. When Em and Dave are watching the late show on TV they hear Cass sucking in rhythmic gulps of air—
ah ah ah AH!
Usually about twelve. Their own room is right underneath Rick and Cass's. Em is secretly pleased that she can go on longer and louder than Cass.

 

There is one last room in the runt house that Em only sees twice. It's at the end of a little hall off the kitchen. From the outside, the house doesn't look big enough to contain the rooms they all use, let alone this extra one whose door is kept shut.

The first time Em sees into it is the day they move in and Rick gives them the tour. He opens the door for just a moment, telling them that this is the old guy's room. The old guy who was buddies with his father in the war and who owns the house and who's paying Rick to look after it while he's in the hospital. And even though he's probably never going to come home again, his room's still off limits.

The name Rick gives to the old guy sounds like Marbles. A few days later, Em is sorting through the mail, bracing herself for yet another Priority Post from her mother begging her to come home and be decent and normal again. Most of the envelopes are addressed to a Mr. Marples. Mr. Garth Marples.

In the instant that Garth Marples' bedroom door is held open, she catches a whiff of old man—a mix of cigarettes and unwashed clothes and neglected flesh. She sees dingy floral wallpaper, a high narrow bed with a white-painted metal frame and a night stand with a drinking glass and a photograph on it. The photograph is turned to face the bed.

The second and last time Em sees inside that room is just before she and Dave move out. On that day, she opens the door, locks it behind her, climbs onto the bed, pulls her coat up over her head, and stays that way, ignoring the knocking and the calling of her name.

But until she opens it herself, the closed door of the off-limits room keeps catching her eye. Who is in that photograph on the night stand, she wonders. Who ever slept in that narrow bed with Garth Marples? Did Garth Marples build the sad little windowless room on its platform in the basement? Did he put the screeching chest of drawers down there and hang the slatted closet door and then paint it all that hideous green?

Why? Who for?

 

Em never does go shopping with Cass for funky clothes. She never goes to the laundromat around the corner with Cass either, or helps her prepare a communal meal. Cass works evenings in a fabric and sewing supplies outlet and Em attends classes by day, so they hardly see each other. When they do, they keep things light. Small talk. They happen to be living together because they happen to be sleeping with two guys who happen to be old buddies.

Em is learning what
old buddies
means. It has a subtle, layered meaning, kind of like
married couple.
“Still going to do something with your music someday?” Rick will say loudly if Dave's harp playing has gone on too long. Dave once started a degree in music, but only went to half the classes, then dropped out completely because they couldn't teach him anything. “Get thrown out of any city council meetings lately?” Dave will shoot back at Rick just before putting his harp away. Rick did two years of a political science degree because he planned to change the system from within. Then he got himself banned from City Hall by crashing meetings stoned and yelling about power to the people.

“Rick, you are such a pig,” Dave will state rhetorically when he finds a knife glued to the kitchen counter with marmalade in which a fly is drowning. “You wanna light a match in there next time?” Rick will bark after Dave as he's leaving the bathroom.

“You guys don't seem to like each other very much,” Em ventures to say one time when each is accusing the other of having thrown out the TV Guide. As one, they stop and look at her. Look back at each other. Grin. “Whaddya mean?” Rick says. “Yeah, what're you talking about?” says Dave. “We're old buddies.” Then, as if to prove it, they start swapping stories about the communal house on Cambie Street where they met. The toilet that leaked into the pantry. The pothead who masturbated into the peanut butter.

There are other old buddy stories that Dave will only tell Em when they're alone together in bed. About him and Rick spending an afternoon going down on a pair of chicks, trading them back and forth. Being late on their way to meet up with two other chicks, because they were driving around looking for a gas station where they could go into the men's and wash their faces.

“You were
horrible
!” Em whisper-shrieks after one of these stories, punching him on the chest and trying not to laugh.

“I still am, Mama,” he says, catching her fist and sliding his other hand up under her nightie.

 

Emily will always keep track of Dave, one way or another. Over dinner with a mutual friend, she will say with studied casualness, “So how is my erstwhile ex?” Through the years she will learn that he has divorced again, married again, is buying a house, is thinking about retiring.

Every couple of years or so they will encounter each other. Once he tries to sit down beside her on the subway, so she gets up and moves away, her face hard, her skin feeling as if it is lifting up off her flesh. Then there is the time on the street corner when she is waiting for the light to change and hears him whistling behind her. That cool shaft of sound she will recognize forever, coming through lips she can still taste. She forces herself not to turn around, feeling him watching her all the way across the street. And, once, she catches sight of him and what must be his latest wife on the fourth floor of the Bay. Housewares and Appliances. She is shopping for a new coffee maker, and they are looking at an ironing board together. She hides behind a pillar of boxed food processors and watches them. An ironing board? Why would you ever need a new ironing board? She still has the one she and Dave packed and brought with them from Vancouver thirty years ago.

When she gets home she does an inventory of the things she still has from her time with Dave. There isn't much besides the ironing board. A couple of prints. An old breadboard. That piece of driftwood from Spanish Banks. Amazing, considering all the stuff they acquired and used up and discarded together.

She begins to picture the trail of cast-off possessions she and Dave left behind them as they moved from one place to another. Each place bigger and more expensive than the last. Each place one they simply had to have, once they had seen it. Once they knew it was there.

They always shed some of their old things—threw them away or gave them away to the Sally Ann—in anticipation of the better and more expensive things they were going to get to fill their new place. Those old pillows Dave took from Liz. They would have been one of the first things to go when they left the runt house. What would they consist of now? Shreds of rotting cloth under tons of landfill? Fragments of feather?

 

The first place they moved to was on Alma Street in Kitsilano. A two-room suite in a converted old house that had a shared bathroom on each floor. They still had to carry their towels back and forth, but at least they had their own kitchen, where they ate off a card table they found at a garage sale.

Dave took Emily shopping on Fourth Avenue, where India print bedspreads were cheap. She put one on the bed and split another in half for curtains. He took her downtown to the Army and Navy store, where she picked out a square wooden breadboard and thick white china plates and stainless steel pots and cutlery.

Their bed, which now doubled as a couch, took up most of the adjoining bed-sitting room. But there was space enough left over for the perfectly good armchair they found on the street and carried home one garbage day, and a corner for the tiny tree they decorated at Christmas.

Dave got taken on full-time at the music store while they were living on Alma Street. Emily finished her second year at university, started her third and began thinking about maybe grad school. Or maybe not. Sometimes in the middle of a class she would picture their two little rooms in her mind and have to stop herself from gathering up her books and leaving and going home to them.

She liked to imagine showing her mother around the place. The two of them were talking on the phone again, but if Dave took the call all he would hear was, “May I please speak to my daughter?” Emily was sure that if she could show her mother their kitchen, her face would soften at the sight and she would start telling stories about the things she had managed to make do with when she and Emily's father were just starting out.

The brightness of that first small kitchen, its fresh yellow paint and dark red floor tiles, stirred something in Emily every time she turned the key and opened the door. She cleaned it and cleaned it like a cat, never allowing a drop of coffee to dry on the counter or a cup to sit unwashed in the sink.

 

Their rent is due. Their rent is overdue. Twenty-five dollars. Twenty-five dollars they don't have. Her student loan is all used up and she won't get the grant portion till next term and it's four days till Dave gets paid. He's had to go to Rick and ask him to let them off for this month. And maybe next month too. They have just enough food to last till payday. If they run out of milk or bread, Em will have to go to Cass and ask if they can share.

“Something'll turn up, Babe,” Dave says. “Just stop worrying and try to relax.”

She can't stop worrying. She can't relax. And she can't understand how he can. How he can go on playing his harp and bickering with Rick and whistling while he's tying shoelaces that have broken and been knotted and then broken again.

Her worries follow her. Surround her. Fill her up. She's late for class because she has to hitchhike up to the campus because the bus is twenty-five cents. She worries all through the lecture, her pen stalled at the top of a blank page. She can barely smile when Dave clowns for her, trying to make her laugh. In bed she lies under him unmoving and unmoved, mentally adding up dollars that are forever short of what they need.

Over the Christmas holidays, when Rick and Cass both leave to visit their families, Em and Dave get into the habit of staying up half the night watching TV, then sleeping in the next day till one or two in the afternoon. They wake to a grey day that fades to a deeper dusk then blackens into night. For hours until they go to bed, the TV screen is their only light. They watch old movies together, imagining themselves as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, or Nick and Nora Charles. Inexplicably rich. Ridiculously carefree.

On Christmas Day, Em takes the coins she has saved up one by one and plinks them one by one into the slot of a payphone. She listens just long enough to hear her mother say, “Hello? Hello?
Hello!
” before hanging up. That night in front of the TV she falls asleep beside Dave on the couch in the middle of the movie. She wakes to find herself being walked tenderly down the basement stairs to their room. Dave murmuring in her ear about how he'll take off her clothes and put her to bed and cover her warm.

 

“I want a bedroom I don't have to entertain my guests in. I want a dining room. With a real dining-room table in it. And I want to take a crap in my own bathroom without my neighbours banging on the door.”

Dave had been talking this way for months, slapping his palm down on the card table in the kitchen. Emily loved his mock outrage, his easy rhetoric. Loved being able to afford it. She couldn't get used to having enough money. A little more than enough.

She and Dave were going for long walks together on the weekends, exploring neighbourhoods, taking down phone numbers from FOR RENT signs. Stopping somewhere in the middle of the afternoon to compare notes over coffee and a croissant. Emily always lingered over hers, moistening a finger and picking up crumbs from her plate. Looking forward to the sight of Dave casually flipping open his wallet to settle the bill and leave a tip.

“We're not students any more. So why are we living like students? Look at us. We don't even look like students.”

Emily's hair was newly cut in a 1920s bob. She had started painting her fingernails a dark red and wearing eye shadow and foundation and blush. She had finished her degree, decided against grad school and taken a part-time job in a library that left her mornings free for writing. She had completed four poems and two short stories, and had started sending them out to magazines.

Dave had shortened his own hair to jaw length and trimmed his beard into a neat goatee. His sales had gone up. He was becoming known to their friends as a sound-system expert, advising them about upgrades and inviting them to come down to the store so he could cut them a deal.

One Friday afternoon, he phoned Emily at the library to tell her he had been promoted to assistant manager. That weekend while they were out walking, they found a real apartment in a real apartment building on a tree-lined avenue off Granville.

 

If there was ever a Golden Age of Emily and Dave, Emily will decide, it would have to be when they were living in that place off Granville. Bluebirds used to nest in the trees outside their bedroom window, for God's sake. And remember the way the venetian blinds sliced the afternoon sun into bright stripes along the living-room floor? And the way the handles of their two umbrellas, in that white ceramic stand by the door, used to lean away from each other to form a heart?

They started subscribing to
The New Yorker
while they were there, trading the latest issue back and forth and posting their favourite cartoons on the refrigerator door. They developed a taste for Art Deco and did the whole place over in black and white—a black and white striped couch, a white dining-room table, black chairs, black frames for the old movie posters on the white walls. They taught each other about gourmet foods and fancy drinks. Together, they cooked expensive, complicated meals full of ingredients their mothers had never heard of and served them to their friends.