Architects Are Here (7 page)

Sometimes she did not like herself, and it was so lovely to have a man say youre worth it. He had grown a beard and wore a new light jacket that someone must have bought for him. He looked good in the neat beard.

Richard.

Nell.

He bought her a drink but she did not drink it. Her body wouldnt allow her. The smell repulsed her. He was writing down strings of numbers. He was writing with a pencil in one of those blue essay booklets. He was a chewer of pencils. There was something well-contained in the pencil, the notebook and the little glass of whisky. His notes on computer algorithms. What the hell, she thought. And he took her back to Arthur’s house. There was no Audi in the driveway, but she felt the betrayal to Arthur with each step. Or the right foot was betrayal and the left foot defiance.

Nell: I didnt know you were still in town.

I wasnt, he said.

I knew Joe was back so I guess I should have known.

There was something in the light in the room. There was a cheeriness that might have to do with paint or windows or the way the stairs opened more light from below. Richard had gone back to Santa Fe with Joe, but Arthur had more work for him this term. The Santa Fe work—overseeing a thesis, marking papers, he could do all that on computer.

Richard: Joe just went back to Santa Fe.

I think I’m pregnant, she said.

All this time she knew Richard had brought her back to make love to her and she did not know she was going to say this. They lay on the bed and listened to a record. She knew, and relied on the knowledge that she was confident. Richard’s momentum halted. The room smelled of the son who had spent the summer here. There was a mixture of Richard and David in the room.

It just occurred to me, Nell said. She had never been pregnant before. There was a trickle inside her like one of those false drinking glasses with liquid embedded in the glass. You didnt have to worry about drinking it. In retrospect she pinpointed the evening of the bonfires and the sudden weight she felt as they left the bed and cleaned up. Sunset. She had been thinking of Joe Hurley when they made love. It had been the first time she had made love thinking about another person.

She lay on the bed with Richard. They just looked at each other with a warmth between them. He was understanding her. Then he warned her. You know the one about not being able to step into the same river twice, he said. Well that’s true with emotions as well. Arthur won’t fall in love with you the way he fell in love with Helen. The only thing that happens twice is, you can recognize an old feeling you had bloom in another person. And Arthur’s probably seeing it, that old feeling. Seeing it in you.

It moved her, this caring. Did this man love her. In the end, he didnt want to have sex with her, and she realized she had misjudged him. Richard wanted to be a friend. He looked like he wanted to say more but was deciding it was against his best interests. He was deciding to give her advice, a warning about men, even though he was a man.

She bought a test at the pharmacy and used the public restrooms. But when she was in the stall she felt it was wrong to find out there. She took a city bus back to the apartment. Lori Durdle from Stephenville was watching a soap opera in the living room. Nell sat on the toilet and unwrapped the wand and held the wand between her legs. It was often hard for her to urinate when someone else was nearby. She could hear the actors on the soap. She could imagine Lori Durdle, fat and unloved, living through the hyperbole of these soap lives. She waited for the see through window to change colour. Then she forgot what it meant if it changed colour. She’d left the box in her room. The yellow stick in the window was turning pink but she did not know if this meant she was pregnant or if pink meant status normal or even if the pregnancy kit could detect the sex of the baby and that she was having a girl.

She crossed to her room. Lori Durdle said hello. She was very nice, Lori Durdle. She was good-hearted and was so right to her marrow. So what if she’d never eaten a red pepper before moving into residence. Lori Durdle didnt have to act at being good.

The box said yellow was not-pregnant and pink, if it crossed into the A half of the window, meant pregnant. She looked at the window. It was all pink.

A
RTHUR SAT NELL DOWN
. No children, he said. She was eating dark cake from a piece of kleenex. They were in Arthur’s office in the arts building. She thought about what Richard had said. She thought how often on the dance floor she’s danced with everyone, including women twice her age. She often led. Okay, Arthur said, there’s no one here to take care of you.

I already know that, she said.

But youre okay with what I’m suggesting.

I’m nineteen.

But she was not okay with it. She had never thought about having children, not since she was fifteen, which felt like a long time ago. She’d thought about them, but it was a bit like thinking about heaven. It would happen way down the road. She had never been pregnant so she said okay to Arthur because he had opened with that position.

I’ve checked again, he said, and there’s no safe place here.

You mean word would get out.

It’s that it’s legal in St John’s.

She had seventy-one dollars in her savings account. At one time she had three hundred thousand dollars and she’d given it to help a continent. Now she was thinking that might have been rash. She remembered the man at Oxfam she had spoken with, how Roger Edgecombe had listened to her and let a silence occur to see if she’d blurt out anything else after she had told him her idea. Roger said a reserve of money could come in handy. There were eventualities. The people who work for the third world are the most aware and conservative when it comes to personal well-being. She had been reckless, but no one could persuade her out of the recklessness.

She agreed to Arthur’s driving her. They would make separate plans to be absent for four days. The drive across took eight hours and Arthur hardly spoke to her. They drove through five hundred miles of woods. Arthur had a lot of music to play on the car stereo. He liked a sort of jazz, she realized. He had arranged an appointment. They stayed in the Newfoundland Hotel. She had never been in a large hotel. She had once left Burlington and hitchhiked to Montreal to see a Picasso exhibit, and had slept outside of a hotel that had been sandblasted. She finally found John Mennie, the man she’d lost her virginity to, and he let her sleep at his apartment but she had to sleep with him. She didnt even take a bath, and had grains of cement in her hair from having slept under the canvas-wrapped scaffolding.

There was a narrow window near the coffee maker. The window had a slice of the harbour and the ocean. So this was the wide-open ocean. That night Arthur cradled her and she could feel his tears while lying in the vise of his elbows.

She wasnt that worried about moving towards what Arthur wanted because it wasnt like he could reach over and snatch it from her arms.

Arthur parked on LeMarchant Road and they looked out upon the orderly fences and the overhanging trees that were not changing colour as they did in Corner Brook. It was more like the wind was tearing the leaves off. Arthur tilted his wrist and compared the time to the turquoise digital counter on the dash. The hospital, the Grace, was across the street from the clinic. He did a mental check of the road, as if he was on duty. That’s where babies were born, whereas the clinic, that’s where the white suction hose is slid into you. There were seven people carrying signs outside the clinic. The signs had all been made by the same hand. They were all women except for one man, Arthur realized, a young man of about twenty. The people needed someone to wind them up. The man looked like the plumber he’d had in last week to fix the bathroom sink. At first he hadnt looked at the plumber, it was just one of the young men Chester Dawe had recommended. The plumber wanted to use sealant and then was vexed as he had to cut the pipe and take the throat of the drain to a hardware store. When he came back Arthur asked if he wanted a coffee. Not if youre making it special. He had coffee on. Do you take milk or sugar. With both, the young man said. Arthur hadnt poured sugar into a coffee mug in a long time. He stirred it and he remembered stirring coffee as a boy with his father in the woods of Michigan. He’d given up sugar when he was twenty. He’d had a roommate in college who asked him why he put sugar in coffee. Dont you drink coffee to taste coffee.

He’d made the plumber the coffee and brought it up to the bathroom, where bits of sink were on an old newspaper and the tub had streaks of oil and dirt. Then he knew who the young man was, Gerard Hurley. He remembered him from that bonfire night. He knew from the eyes. He’d seen Gerard as a kid on the beach at the cabins they had at Grand Lake. His brother Joe and his father, Loyola. Plumbing and bathroom supplies. Gerard’s hands were busy, so Arthur put the coffee on the floor. This is the original pipe, Gerard Hurley said, from when the house was built. So what he had in his hand was a piece of plumbing his father had installed. That happened, Gerard said. He often came across his father’s work. He noticed the coffee on the floor and said, Thank you for the coffee. There was something wrong in the thank-you and in Gerard Hurley’s face, and Arthur had wondered if he shouldnt have put the cup on the floor.

It was the same look in the face of the young man holding the placard. A rough look. He was not strident, just noting a breach in etiquette. He wasnt from town either, he was from around the bay. And he was the only man. One of the women laughed and another was looking at her watch, just the way Arthur did. I won’t have it, she said. And Arthur slowly realized what Nell was saying. Arthur Twombly lit a cigarette and waited behind the wheel of the car he loved. He had given up smoking when his second son was born. Almost twenty years. He was going to see his son tonight. He felt the chill you get when you leave a public swimming pool. It may not be yours anyway, she said. And he knew what she meant and had hoped with eighty percent of his heart that she would say that. Other men. He would be generous though, he would not cave into anger, because part of him knew she was giving him the easy out. He was alarmed at the sudden new creation and how a corner of his brain thought it was Zac coming back.

Okay, he said, whose might it be if you dont mind me asking.

A boy, she said.

Okay, a boy. And they returned to the hotel and did not talk until he was changing his shirt and said he was having dinner with his son, which meant she was on her own for the night.

H
E ARRIVED
at the apartment on Elizabeth Avenue, the one I was sharing with David Twombly. And that was the night we went to the hockey game and had an uncomfortable dinner at the Battery Hotel. There was a moment when the visiting goalie asked for an ice repair, and Mr Twombly pointed this out. That the referee shaved some ice with his own skate and tamped the fresh ice in the gully with the hockey puck and sprayed the shaved ice with the goalie’s water bottle. He liked that the referee had used everything at his disposal, and nothing new specifically meant for ice repair.

SIX

H
ELEN CROFTER DISCOVERED
the green envelope of photographs Arthur had sent in to get developed on Caribou Road. They were lying in his study the weekend he went to St John’s. She’d picked them up to look at them again. There was one of herself that she wanted to destroy. She felt she wasnt photogenic, and that was too bad as we were going to be photographed more and more. She’d seen the pictures, or some of them, the ones he’d said were good of her but were not, some of the dinner party and a few of their son just before he’d left for university. She’d asked Arthur to give David the one of her and him, to remind her son that his mother loved him, for there was love in both of their faces. But Arthur had forgotten it, it was still there in the pack. Though it did not feel like a full pack of film and she counted them and there were fifteen photos in the package. She withdrew the negatives to see which ones he’d brought. There were four hinged panels of six. She lifted a strip of negatives to the light and saw faces that were not faces she knew. She focused to turn the black face white and the white hair black. They looked like someone else’s photos, entirely foreign, and she was prepared to return them until she saw the one face, they were all the one face now. Photos of a student who had been to dinner. But it wasnt the dinner. There was utter delight and abandon and shyness and entitlement in the negatives, a linked sheet of them, an inappropriate gesture in every goddamn picture of this girl. And the things in the background were not of this house. It was another time and place these pictures, there was no dinner party going on in these pictures at all.

She had thought, like Arthur, that they had turned a corner. But what if it had only been before the summer. Could she forgive it if this was last year. But he wasnt here for her to confront him. She had to wait.

Helen waited the three days. She forgot about the photographs for twenty minutes and then remembered them for an hour or two. It wore on for the three days that Arthur was away. Then she heard the car door. She ran to the porch. She couldnt believe she was running.

The pictures, Arthur.

Oh you found them.

I found the negatives.

He collapsed in the hallway. He was carrying his soft carrier bag and it was this shoulder that slid down the wall and he was sitting on the bag, one leg bent beneath him. He could not think of a thing to say. Nothing seemed plausible. He was surprised to see that he was crying.

We had a little thing, he said. I’ve barely kissed her.

But he knew that Nell’s predicament would be discovered. There wasnt much inventiveness happening in the factory of his brain. His brain knew he was done for. He had collapsed partly for the shock value but the crying was unexpected. Then he thought of something.

Richard, he said, has been sleeping with her. Those are Richard’s pictures.

Are you all right down there. Youre not having a heart attack.

I’m exhausted, he said. It was exhausting.