Life Before Man (15 page)

They smelled the smoke and broke the door down and got her out of there, but she already had third-degree burns on half her body. She lived for a week in hospital, lying on the mattress wet with drugs and the body’s futile defenses, white cells leaking into the sheets. Who knows what she was remembering, whether she even knew who I was? She hadn’t seen me for ten years, but she must have had some dim idea she’d once had daughters. She let me hold her hand, the left one that wasn’t burned, and I thought: She looks like the moon, the half-moon. One side still shining.

Elizabeth has always considered Auntie Muriel responsible for this death. As for others, her sister’s, for instance. Nevertheless, she is here. Partly because she’s a snob, which she admits. She wants the children to see that she grew up in a house with a dinner gong and eight bedrooms, not in one like the diminutive row-house (though charming, and what a lot she’s done with it) where they now live. Also, Auntie Muriel is their only close living relative. Elizabeth feels that this is because Auntie Muriel has either killed or driven away all the others, but never mind. She is their roots, their root, their twisted diseased old root. Other people, such as those in Buffalo, think that Toronto has changed, shaken off its blue-law ways, become chic and liberal, but Elizabeth knows it hasn’t. At its core, where there should be a heart, there is only Auntie Muriel.

She has exiled Auntie Muriel from Christmas, having said no, finally, four years ago, to the dark table with six insertable leaves, the symmetrically arranged crystal dishes of pickle and cranberry sauce, the linen tablecloth, the silver napkin rings. Nate refused to come with her any more; that was why. He said he wanted to enjoy his children and his dinner and there was no point going to Auntie Muriel’s if Elizabeth was going to collapse into bed with a headache as soon as they got home. Once, in 1971, she’d thrown up onto a snowbank on the way back: turkey, cranberry sauce, Auntie Muriel’s selection of relishes, the works.

At first she’d resented Nate’s refusal, interpreted it as a lack of support. But he’d been right, he is right. She should not be here.

Auntie Muriel is continuing her monologue, which is directed ostensibly at the children but actually at Elizabeth. They should never forget, she says, that their grandfather owned half of Galt.
Great-grandfather, Guelph
, Elizabeth thinks. Perhaps Auntie Muriel is going senile at last; or perhaps this family mythology is only a mythology after all, and, like any oral history, its details are
undergoing mutation. Auntie Muriel does not correct herself, though. She has never been known to correct herself. She is now saying that Toronto is not what it was, and for that matter neither is the entire country. The Pakis are taking over the city and the French are taking over the government. A shopgirl (implied: foreign, dark-skinned, accented, or all three) was rude to her in Creeds just last Wednesday. And as for Creeds, it has gone completely downhill. They used to put fur coats in the windows and now they put belly dancers. She supposes that Elizabeth, with her attitudes (implied: degenerate), thinks this is all right, but she herself will never get used to it. She is old, she remembers better things.

Elizabeth doesn’t know which is worse, this conversation or last year’s, in which Auntie Muriel subjected the children to an account of the trials and tribulations she’d undergone in her attempt to gather the entire family together in one corner of the Mount Pleasant Cemetery. In the story, she’d made no distinction between the living and the dead, referring to her own plot as though she herself were already in it and to the others as if they were guests at a picnic she was throwing. Uncle Teddy was already in the right place, of course, but Elizabeth’s mother and sister had to be moved from St. James and her grandfather from the old Necropolis. As for Elizabeth’s father, there was no telling where he’d wandered off to.

Elizabeth could probably have interfered with these operations if she wanted to, but she didn’t have the strength. She knew what Auntie Muriel was like when thwarted. If Auntie Muriel wanted to play chess with her dead relatives, let her. Luckily they were all in urns rather than coffins. They had no idea, Auntie Muriel said, how cheeky certain lawyers and cemetery supervisors could be. Of course these days a lot of them had foreign accents. She’d then described an intricate series of real-estate dealings that seemed to concern the trading-off of one plot in exchange for another. Her ultimate plan was to acquire a large block of holdings and then exchange it for a
mausoleum. Elizabeth refrained from asking whether or not Auntie Muriel had reserved a spot for her.

Going home in the taxi, Nancy says, “She’s funny.”

This view of Auntie Muriel has never occurred to Elizabeth before. Funny in what way, she wants to know.

“She says funny things.”

And Elizabeth realizes that, for them, this is all Auntie Muriel is: a curiosity. They like going to see her for the same reason they like going to the Museum. She cannot touch them or harm them, they are out of her reach. She can touch and harm only Elizabeth. Because Auntie Muriel once had all power over her, she will always have some. Elizabeth is an adult in much of her life, but when she’s with Auntie Muriel she is still part child. Part prisoner, part orphan, part cripple, part insane; Auntie Muriel the implacable wardress.

She goes to visit her, then, out of defiance. Look, I’ve grown up. I walk on two legs, unsteadily maybe, but you haven’t got me into one of those urns of yours, not yet. I live my life despite you and I will continue to live it. And see, these are my children. Look how beautiful, how intelligent, how normal they are. You never had children. You can’t touch them. I won’t let you.

L
esje is doing something seedy. If someone, one of her friends, Marianne for instance, was doing the same thing and told her about it, she would think: seedy. Or even tacky. Very tacky, to be having an affair with a married man, a married man with two children. Married men with children are proverbially tacky, with their sad stories, their furtive lusts and petty evasions. Tackier still to be doing it in a hotel, of necessity a comparatively tacky hotel, since Nate is, as he says, a little broke. Lesje hasn’t offered to pay the hotel bill herself. Once, long ago, her women’s group might have sneered at this reluctance, but there is a limit.

Lesje doesn’t feel tacky. She isn’t sure whether Nate does or not. He’s sitting in one of the chairs (there are two, both cheap Danish Modern with frayed corners, to match the blue frayed bed-spread which is as yet undisturbed), telling her how terrible he feels that they have to be in this hotel instead of somewhere else. The somewhere his tone implies is not another, more acceptable hotel. It’s a summer field, a deserted sun-warmed beach, a wooded knoll with breezes.

Lesje doesn’t mind the hotel, even though the hum from the air conditioner is beginning to get to her. It’s spewing out thick hot air which smells of upholstery and cigar butts, and they haven’t been able to find the switch that turns it off. If this hotel had been a choice, she’d feel differently about it, but it’s a necessity. They can’t go to Lesje’s apartment because of William, who was out when Lesje left but who may reappear at any moment, to find the note Lesje has thoughtfully propped on the card table:
Back at 6:00
. They can’t go to Nate’s, ever, unless Lesje takes time off work during the week. She works the same hours Elizabeth does, though Elizabeth probably has more flexibility. But today is Saturday and Elizabeth is at home. Not to mention the children. Nate hasn’t mentioned the children, but even so he’s managed to convey to Lesje that although he respects her, admires her and desires her, to his children she represents an evil from which he must protect them.

Hence this afternoon hotel. They’ve come to it by subway, since neither of them owns a car. This fact also rules out necking on side streets, which is what they should be doing at this preliminary stage, in Lesje’s opinion. They have in fact necked on side streets, but it’s been uncomfortable: feet freezing in slush, passing cars splattering them with brown sludge, arms hugging the bolster shapes of each others’ winter coats. But no groping in the front seat.

Lesje considers groping in the front seat almost an essential. The only other affairs she’s had have been with William, champion groper, and before him a geologist in fourth-year university who even then, in 1970, had a crew cut. Neither of these affairs was exactly romantic; both had been based on mutual interests, of a sort. It was hard for Lesje to find men who were as monomaniacal about their subjects as she was about hers. They existed, but they tended to go out with Home Economics types. After a day of pondering surds and pingoes they wanted to put their feet up and eat grated carrot and marshmallow salads. They didn’t want to talk about
Megalosaurus tibias or whether the pterosaurs had three-chambered or four-chambered hearts, which was what she wanted to talk about. The geologist had been fine; they could compromise on rock strata. They went on hikes with their little picks and kits, and chipped samples off cliffs; then they ate jelly sandwiches and copulated in a friendly way behind clumps of goldenrod and thistles. She found this pleasurable but not extremely so. She still has a collection of rock chips left over from this relationship; looking at it does not fill her with bitterness. He was a nice boy but she wasn’t in love with him. She is not exactly a paradigm of modish chic, she knows that, but she could never quite fall in love with a man who says “wow.”

As for William, what they have in common is an interest in extinction. She confines it to dinosaurs, however. William applies it to everything. Except cockroaches; a cockroach has been found living in a nuclear reactor. The next age, according to William, will be the age of the insects. On most days he’s quite cheerful about this.

Lesje isn’t sure what she means by
in love
. Once she thought she was in love with William, since it upset her that he did not ask her to marry him. But recently she’s begun to question this. At first she welcomed the relative simplicity, even the bareness, of their life together. They were both committed to their jobs, and they had, it seemed, easily met expectations and only minor areas of friction. But Nate has changed things, he has changed William. What was once a wholesome absence of complications is now an embarrassing lack of complexity. For instance, William would have lunged as soon as they were inside the door. Not so Nate.

They sit on either side of the large double bed which looms like fate in the center of the room, each with a cigarette, drinking out of the hotel glasses which contain Scotch from Nate’s pocket flask mixed with tap water. Gazing across the bed as if it’s a fathomless gulf, while Nate apologizes, Lesje listens, veiling her face with her hand, smoke making her squint. Nate doesn’t want just an affair, he
says. Lesje is touched by this; she doesn’t think to ask what he does want. William has never been at such pains to explain himself.

Lesje feels that something momentous is about to take place. Her life is about to change: things will not be as they have been before. The walls of the hotel, patterned with greenish lozenges, are dissolving, she is moving through the open air, no longer snow-filled and tinged with exhaust fumes but clean and sunny; on the horizon there’s the glimmer of water. Why then doesn’t Nate stub out his cigarette, stand up, take her in his arms? Now that he has her in this tacky bedroom.

But instead he pours himself another drink and continues to explain. He wants everything to be clear at the beginning. He doesn’t want Lesje to think she’s breaking up a marriage. As she no doubt knows, Elizabeth has had other lovers, the most recent of whom was Chris. Elizabeth has never made any secret of that. She thinks of Nate as the father of her children but not as her husband. They haven’t lived together, he means slept together, for several years, he isn’t sure how many. They’ve stayed in the same house together because of the children. Neither of them can stand the thought of living apart from the children. So naturally Elizabeth will have no objection to his doing what Lesje wishes he would hurry up and do.

The mention of Elizabeth startles Lesje, who realizes that she hasn’t been thinking about her at all. She ought to be thinking about her. You don’t just stroll into another woman’s life and take over her husband. Everyone in the women’s group agreed, in theory at least, on the reprehensibility of such behavior, although they also agreed that married people should not be viewed as each other’s property but as living, growing organisms. What it boiled down to was that man-stealing was out but personal growth was commendable. You had to have the right attitude and be honest with yourself. These
convolutions had discouraged Lesje; she hadn’t understood why so much time was being spent on them. But at that point she’d never been in such a situation, and now she is.

She certainly doesn’t want to play Other Woman in some conventional, boring triangle. She doesn’t feel like an other woman; she isn’t wheedling or devious, she doesn’t wear negligées or paint her toenails. William may think she’s exotic, but she isn’t really; she’s straightforward, narrow and unadorned, a scientist; not a web-spinner, expert at the entrapment of husbands. But Nate no longer seems like Elizabeth’s husband. His family is surely external to him; in himself he’s single, a free agent. And Elizabeth is therefore not the wife of Nate, she isn’t a wife at all. Instead she’s a widow, Chris’s widow if anyone’s, moving unpaired and grieving down an autumn avenue, leaves from the over-arching trees falling on her faintly disheveled hair. Lesje consigns her to this mournfully romantic picture, frames her, and then forgets about her.

William is another matter. William will mind; he will definitely mind in one way or another. But Lesje doesn’t intend to tell him about this, at least not yet. Nate has implied that although Elizabeth would give the seal of approval to what he’s doing and may even be pleased for him, since in a way they are good friends, now is not the right time to tell her. Elizabeth has been making an adjustment, not as quick an adjustment as he’d like to see but definitely an adjustment. He wants her to finish doing that before he gives her something new that she has to adjust to. It has something to do with the children.