Elizabeth and After (21 page)

With Elizabeth his role was less clear. Sometimes she would meet him at the office and they’d commiserate about library problems over lunch at the Timberpost: the heating, the volunteer staffing, the fact that more people used the library to dispose of old books than to take books out. Every week or two it would be Elizabeth on the phone about something or other. “Adam,” she would start.
Adam
. That was how he knew he was alive, hearing Elizabeth say his name. Or so he thought.

Between his dates with Maureen and his vaguely illicit conversations with Elizabeth, Adam began to see his passage from the traumatic moment of being three cubed to that of his comfortable early thirties as the triumphant story of an emotionally crippled youth who had somehow thrown off his shackles and become a charming sophisticated ladies’ man, secretly in love with one woman while doing his duty with another. Certain mornings while knotting his tie in front of the mirror, he would even catch himself whistling and winking at his own image as he prepared for another day of flattery and deception.

But one Sunday in December 1965, one of those Sundays after a Saturday when he had taken Maureen to the movies,
the accountant took over. The accountant had had enough. The accountant started talking numbers and the first number was zero. Zero was what Adam’s idea of being a ladies’ man added up to. Zero was the amount of romance in his life. Zero was the number that best corresponded to his sexual activities. Zero, zero, zero, the accountant decreed. For his next number the accountant took out Adam’s agendas for the past several years and calculated that between Saturdays, holidays and special features, he had just gone to the movies with Maureen for the sixty-fourth time. 4×4×4. The fateful end of the fateful cube. In their journey through those cubes their partings had not increased in passion. Although now he sometimes came into the house with her where they would sit in the Knight living room—always alone as the parents, Albert and Elspeth, would have discreetly ascended—and in the hinting rosy glow of the tiffany lamps Adam would feel for Maureen something approaching a very strong fondness.

He had discovered she was not unamusing. On the contrary. As they’d got to know each other and as she got to know West Gull, it seemed to Adam that much like him she was an independent and detached observer of the town’s affairs. Instead of haltingly making their way through dinner and a half-bottle of wine, they doubled their alcohol dosage and often got so involved in gossiping that they risked missing their movie.

Sixty-four. Adam wrote the number in large figures on a pad in front of him. Sixty-four = 4×4×4. That was a lot of dinners, a lot of Saturdays and holidays and special-feature nights. At the rate he was going he would be sixty-four years old, moving from his very last complete cube into the unpredictable loose change and still wondering when it was that slow-maturing Goldsmith gene was going to drag itself over
the finish line. And he remembered something peculiar about the sixty-fourth Saturday night. While trying to put his coat on in the Knight hallway, his arm had caught in his sports jacket and Maureen had moved close to help him. There was absolutely nothing sexual in her gesture, just an assumed familiarity that had left them standing face to face touching each other with no need or desire to move away. Adam thought about this moment, the microscopic micro-moment buried within it like a speck-sized mussel on a gigantic platter, a microscopic micro-moment he had perhaps tried to hide from himself. Within that tiny irreducible moment in time, he now remembered he had come very close to creating yet another irreducible moment by putting his arms around Maureen Knight. A sudden flare had filled his belly; an inner voice had commanded him to wrench his hands apart, spread them wide, then rejoin them behind Maureen’s back. Adam Goldsmith had been on the very verge of this action, his arms had even begun a slow surround, when a noise from upstairs had frozen him. At the memory Adam’s heart thumped so loudly he thought someone must be knocking at his door. No one’s there, the accountant said. Zero is the number of people coming to your door. And that was when Adam Goldsmith resolved that in a week and a half, at the Richardson New Year’s party, he was going to ask Maureen Knight to be his wife.

He spent the whole day cleaning his house and feeling quite pleased with himself. It was only in the evening, standing in front of his stove stirring a can of soup and preparing the exact words of his proposal—
Before I begin let me assure you that even the most negative, hostile or shocked reaction to these words will in no way decrease my esteem for you or my desire that our friendship continue—
that he found himself envisioning
Elizabeth in the place of Maureen. A warm melting glow suffused him and into his mind came the blurred image of Elizabeth he couldn’t let go of—Elizabeth, hair streaming like a goddess, diving white and naked into Dead Swede Lake.

By the evening of the party Adam had refined his plan. Early on he would ask Maureen Knight if he might walk her home after midnight. On this walk, fortified by a few drinks and the fact that he’d already prepared the way by requesting this extraordinary interview, he would pop the question.

To bolster his courage Adam decided to buy a new suit, hand-tailored from a shop Albert Knight had once mentioned at dinner. In front of the full-length mirrors for the final fitting, Adam hardly recognized himself. In his perfectly tailored suit, his hair that with the years had become a dark chocolate brown—except for his sideburns which were now a snowy white—he no longer resembled the old pictures of the bony-faced Hank Goldsmith. Now he had the sleek look of the sort of man he would expect to see in a movie about an expensive ocean liner. “You’ve got the figure for clothes,” the tailor said in a contented voice and Adam decided this was where he would buy his wedding tuxedo.

At nine o’clock on New Year’s Eve he was at the Richardson mantelpiece, wondering if anyone would notice his finery, when the Knights arrived. Maureen, too, was in costume: she was wearing a low-cut black dress with a layer of lace netting stretched modestly over her décolletage and her hair was swept up in a way Adam had never seen, leaving her ears and neck exposed. It unnerved him, the way her thin naked arched neck seemed to be offering itself to some invisible guillotine, and he thought he might lose his courage. But strolling with Maureen towards the dining room, which had been transformed for this year’s party into a casino palace complete with velvet-covered
gaming tables ruled over by girls of the graduating class costumed as croupiers, Adam stopped and took hold of Maureen’s elbow. He could feel the flesh giving under his fingers and he almost let go for fear he was hurting her. “I was thinking,” he said, “I might walk you home after midnight.” Before he could retract this outrageous statement Maureen gave her anxious smile, inclined her head and said, “Of course,” as though she’d expected exactly this, and moved on.

He was back at the hearth wondering what his mother would think of his marrying Maureen, when he heard his name. “Adam.”

“Elizabeth.” If there was one person in whom he could confide his happiness, it was surely Elizabeth.

“Adam, this isn’t white wine, it’s a martini. Why are we drinking martinis?”

He explained to her that the gaming tables and martinis were a celebration of Luke’s new passion: money. He had decided to leave politics—“a loser’s game,” Luke had confided—to make his fortune in real estate. Just as Adam was about to change topics and tell her about Maureen, Elizabeth began talking about the problems she was having with a mother who was convinced the school was plotting against her child, and another who was incensed Elizabeth was reading
Pride and Prejudice
to her Grade Six class—“You can tell by the title it isn’t suitable”—and then they were on their third martini and discussing a censorship movement in another school district; meanwhile the band was playing and they were on their fourth martini and Elizabeth was telling Adam about the time her father had insisted they celebrate New Year’s at the Holiday Inn but walked out before midnight because he didn’t like the way the bandleader looked at her mother. “Adam, Adam, I’m drunk.”

Adam looked at his watch. It was only an hour until midnight, his last bachelor’s New Year’s Eve midnight. “There’s something I must tell you,” he said, because while listening to Elizabeth’s accelerating chatter and keeping pace on the martini front, he had become ever more determined to divulge his secret.

“I
must
tell you something,” he repeated.

“I know, Adam, I
know
. And I
must
tell you … my story … Adam, I’ve hardly started but I’m so drunk I need to go home. Adam, show me where the coats are.”

“You’ll drive yourself into a ditch,” Adam said, twice, but Elizabeth kept shaking her head and insisting.
“Adam, I know what Im doing.”
He decided he would humour her, then tell McKelvey Elizabeth was sick and needed to be taken home.

They went upstairs to the guest room where Elizabeth knelt on the bed and began sorting through the mound of ladies’ coats. Finally she dragged hers out. It was a cast-off from her mother that looked, as she’d said to Adam a couple of weeks before, as though it had been made from underprivileged raccoons. She struggled into it, straightened up and suddenly her face was so stricken Adam was sure she was about to be sick.

“Kiss me, Adam,” Elizabeth said. Her voice was dry. Adam bent down and gave her a peck on the cheek.

“Come on, Adam, I want your best. Give me your number one.”

This time he pecked her on the lips. Elizabeth wrinkled her nose and sighed with disappointment, the way she sometimes did after ordering dessert at the Timberpost.

“Let’s go, Adam.” She got off the bed, took his hand and led him out of the bedroom. But instead of heading downstairs she continued towards the back of the house. She pulled him into an empty room, locked the door and gave him her
number one. Adam stood there, stunned. It was as though another universe had wrapped itself around his face, the universe of Elizabeth’s lips, her eyelashes, her breath. She’s drunk, he suddenly thought, but even drunk she’s going to realize—hey, God, I’m kissing old
Adam
, how embarrassing. Instead she unbuttoned her blouse and put his hands where his hands had never been. They lay down on the carpet in the dark and soon his whole body was surrounded by what he had once mistaken for a blurry white mermaid.

At first he came to consciousness thinking he must have dreamed the whole thing. He was lying on the bed alone, his pants in humid disarray, his shirt unbuttoned, and with his eyes closed he could still feel Elizabeth’s body on his, his on Elizabeth’s everything. He stood up and reassembled himself. “Wait a few minutes” had been her last words. He patted his shirt smooth, tried to slap the wrinkles from his new tailored trousers. The strains of “Auld Lang Syne” were beginning to rise from the hall. He pushed at his hair—luckily his hair had always been easy to smooth into place—and opened the door. When he got downstairs the music was over. Elizabeth and McKelvey were chatting with the Boyces, Maureen was standing slightly apart from her parents, her white neck gleaming sacrificially beneath the chandelier.

It was early May when Elizabeth told Adam she was pregnant. “It happened at New Year’s. Can you imagine? Bill got too drunk, the way he always does at the Richardsons’ and when we got home—well…” She said all this while looking Adam straight in the eye. They were at the Timberpost. Since January Elizabeth had been stopping by for lunches as though nothing had transpired. No coy hand-holding, no whispers or winks. Nothing at all to relieve the terrible secret Adam felt
weighing on him the whole time, a secret so literally,
physically
heavy, he felt, especially when he saw Elizabeth, that it could send him crashing through the earth.

He had thought of that secret as an actual stone expanding inside him; when Elizabeth told him about the baby his first impulse was to point out this comical connection. And yet there was that other smaller lighter secret, the one he had already tried to tell Elizabeth; in fact, the coincidence was that Adam had been planning—that very same lunch—to let Elizabeth know of his engagement to Maureen Knight. For months he and Maureen had been keeping it “to enjoy it for ourselves,” as Maureen had put it but now that they were about to tell Albert and Elspeth, Adam had decided he must first inform Elizabeth. But with her eyes on him—daring him to contradict? begging him not to?—he felt his tongue begin to tremble with the words he couldn’t find. Tremble, then tingle and swell. That old feeling had come over him, his face was layered with sweat and he was gripping the table, terrified by what was coming. Elizabeth started again: “When I got pregnant with McKelvey the first time, I changed my whole life, which turned out to be a mistake. So this time I’m not changing anything. I’m just going to go on as I am and hope the baby gets born alive. That’s what I want and I want it very much.”

Adam could feel the sweat pooling in the hollow of his collarbone and armpits. Elizabeth pushed her glass of water to him. Eventually he was able to let go of the table and take a sip. “I … I…” he started but had to wait until his tongue was almost normal. “I wish you every happiness.”

That night Adam sat in his kitchen drinking Scotch and asking himself what it would be like to be married to Maureen while watching the baby he might or might not have given
Elizabeth become a man or a woman. That would be a secret big enough to fill a whole house. Then Adam asked another question: what might Maureen think of being married to a man who’d made another woman pregnant on the night of their engagement? Of course there was no need for Maureen to know. But if he told her it would be her secret, too. They’d both have their guts filled with it. Until it killed them or dissolved or wore away or turned them into something else—whatever it was such secrets did.

When Carl was old enough to start school Elizabeth started teaching again. In the meantime Adam saw her only at the New Year’s parties; as always Elizabeth and he would lean against the mantlepiece and drink, though the martini experiment was never repeated since half the township had ended up in ditches. The first year she was back teaching, on October 1, Carl’s birthday, Elizabeth called Adam to suggest lunch. He hadn’t expected it and had to break an appointment which of course he did. As always they went to the Timberpost. It was strange to sit across the table from her again. Over the years her face had grown narrower, her eyes brighter. Although she’d had and nurtured the child she wanted so much, it was easy to imagine that whatever had been driving her before was now beginning to consume her. There was a new way she had of folding and unfolding her hands, as though they didn’t quite know what to do with themselves. But meanwhile she talked easily, as she always had, this time about the changes that had transpired at the school and in West Gull since she’d last been teaching.