Elizabeth and After (41 page)

Carl is driving from the Balfer place across the flatlands towards West Gull. Lizzie has her hand in his pocket for warmth and her head on his shoulder, the way she’s taken to doing these winter mornings. He has Lizzie all the time now except every second weekend and holidays. Chrissy has moved to Toronto to live with an aunt and take courses at a business school. Midweek she calls Lizzie. When Carl answers he talks to her for a few moments. Her voice has new layers of fatigue and distance. “I’m starting again,” she’s said to Carl, twice, and he understands what she’s doing: she’s trying to make herself small, small enough to slide backwards in time to that Richardson New Year’s Eve party when she first asked him to dance. He can’t tell her it’s a place he’s also tried to get to, or that he used to tell himself that had he turned away from Chrissy he wouldn’t have fought with Fred, wouldn’t have guzzled half a bottle of brandy to kill the pain, wouldn’t have driven his mother into a tree. Over Long Gull Lake the sun is coming up grey-gold and along the concession roads small clusters of children are waiting for the school buses. A few other vehicles, like his own, are homing in on West Gull. In a few minutes the school will be open, the supermarket working its way to daytime temperature levels, the bank computers processing the night’s numbers. Richardson’s New & Used will have unlocked its doors. Adam’s office, a corner cubicle off the showroom, will be lit and waiting for Carl who ever since the reading of the will has been cleaning and organizing Adam’s files.

When he gets to the New & Used, Carl parks at the back of the lot and buys a coffee from the Timberpost before going into Adam’s office. He closes the door with its frosted-glass window, puts his jacket on the hook, opens the top drawer. Every day for a week, he’s looked at the wax-sealed envelope
with his name on the outside. He takes the lid off his coffee, brings the steaming surface to his lips. He opens the letter Adam has written him. For the next two days his tongue will be scalded and he’ll always associate what he reads in the letter with the overheated bitter Timberpost coffee.

It was the beginning of September, the first week of school, and the warmth and humidity of a late-August heat wave still blanketed the township. With a cup of coffee in her hand, Elizabeth stood at her kitchen window, soaking up the morning light and wondering if her geraniums would last out the month
.

Carl and McKelvey came down for breakfast radiating a great mute wooden wall of hungry maleness. In their collective silence they ate, they drank, they piled the dishes, after which McKelvey went out to the barns while Elizabeth prepared to take Carl to school
.

On the highway she said to him, for no reason at all except that it had come into her mind, “If there was one thing you could have different, what would it be?”

Carl was twelve that year. He had developed a transparent fringe of fuzz on his upper lip and his sideburns were growing wispy extensions. He sat silently for a while and Elizabeth thought about how essentially reserved Carl was, how he always seemed to be holding something back, as though he’d divided himself off to keep from finding out the secret that he’d never be told. “Be someone else, I guess,” Carl said
.

Elizabeth was stunned. Finally she asked, “Who?”

“You, maybe.”

That night Carl came into the kitchen while Elizabeth was doing dishes. “If you were me you’d be washing these,” Elizabeth said
.

Carl sat down. “I was just kidding. Giving the teacher the smart answer.”

In the middle of the night Elizabeth woke up, uncomfortably warm. McKelvey lay beside her, his usual night mountain, breath rising and falling in that noisy chorus that grew louder every year. She got out of bed, put on her slippers and a robe, went downstairs and outside
.

The sky had a thin veil of clouds and the moon, tinted orange by the pollen held in the mist, hung ripe and heavy over the barn. “You, maybe,” Carl had said in that flat, diffident way he had when something truly mattered. She should have stopped the car and hugged him. She should have crowed in triumph or gratefully wept at having mothered this child she had touched just as he’d touched her
.

A breeze came up and she found herself surrounded by the familiar rustle of leaves. Tomorrow she was seeing Adam for lunch at the Timberpost. Not a word would be said about Carl. They would chatter about the library, his work at the New & Used, her new class. Maureen Knight had returned to town; according to Dorothy Dean she was thought to have Parkinson’s and Adam was spending a lot of time with her. He should have married Maureen Knight, Elizabeth knew. And her telling Adam that Carl was his son was what likely prevented him. And yet, just as she had been helpless to resist the strange passion for him that had overcome her for so many years, so had she been unable to let him go. Of course she had stopped their afternoons. And at first, afterwards, she could hardly bear to see him. Later it was as though they were fellow survivors of a brushfire that had burned everything around them. She could even look at his hands without blushing or melting, walk by his side without wishing they were back in the make-believe motel world, a world she could only truly remember on
New Years Eves when she’d had too much to drink and Adam waltzed her slowly around the Great Hall
.

“If there was one thing you could have different…?” she’d asked Carl. And what about herself? The wind had got under her robe and nightgown; her skin contracted with cold. And suddenly from the barn, like an echo of her dream, came the questioning moo duet of Jane Eyre and Anna Karenina. Had she, like Anna Karenina, ruined her life over a man? Or was it that she had been too frightened to ruin her life and wished she had? The cattle, sensing her presence, had put their heads out the barn door and were staring at her as if to say they wouldn’t be able to sleep until she solved the riddle of her life. “Maybe what I’d like,” Elizabeth said to them, “is to have it both ways, the way you do: my rear end in the barn, my front end free to admire the beauties of nature, speculate on the foolishness of others and have a few snacks.” Anna Karenina and Jane Eyre, unmoved, continued chewing their cud, jaws slowly grinding in harmony with Elizabeth’s slowly grinding thoughts. Her skin was tight, painful with desire and the need to be released. She walked to the fence and leaned against it, trembling. The cows took a step closer. The pain that had started in her skin, her breasts, was now radiating out from her groin, a screaming reproach to everything she had denied in herself Just as she opened her mouth to scream back, the pain faded and she was left clinging to the cedar rail, soaked in sweat and wondering if it was pain that she’d felt or something else, some excess of unlived life demanding to be born. “You tell me,” she said to her cows. They nodded their heads slowly, either in sympathy or confusion, then backed into the barn as Elizabeth went towards the house to make tea
.

When she had the cup in her hands, steaming and aromatic, a candle lit to keep her company, she stood at the window looking out at the barn. She saw the yellow flame reflected in the
mirror of the glass, the blurred image of her own face, the night-black lawn sloping down to the driveway where her car’s chrome gleamed in the moonlight
.

In addition to receiving the Governor General’s Award for Fiction for
Elizabeth and After
, Matt Cohen was awarded the Harbourfront Festival Prize and the Toronto Arts Award for Writing. His previous novel,
Last Seen
, was a finalist for both the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Award, and was chosen by Margaret Atwood as Best Book of 1996 (
Maclean’s)
. He was the author of thirteen novels, as well as collections of short stories, translations and books for children. Matt Cohen died in December 1999 in Toronto.