Life Before Man (28 page)

Perhaps it wasn’t even Nate himself that attracted her at first, but Elizabeth. Elizabeth and Chris. She’d looked at Elizabeth and seen an adult world where choices had consequences, significant, irreversible.

William never represented such a choice, William was open-ended. She must have thought she could live with William for a million years and nothing in her would really be changed. Obviously William hadn’t felt like this. William, like a miser with a sock, had invested things when she wasn’t looking, so that his outburst of violence had taken her by surprise. But she’s beyond William now, even his rage. William was only momentarily painful.

Nate, on the other hand, is painful almost all the time. Holding her two hands he says, “You know how important you are to me.” When she wants him to say he would kill for her, die for her. If he would only say that, she would do anything for him. But
how important
invites measurement, the question:
How
important? For her Nate is absolute, but for him she exists on a scale of relatively important things. She can’t tell exactly where on the scale she is; it fluctuates.

In the evenings she sits at their newly acquired table, beside the stove and the wheezy fridge she paid far too much for at the Goodwill store, and broods. When she lived with William he did most of the brooding.

“What is it, love?” Nate says. She does not know how to answer.

She prolongs her cup of coffee for as long as possible, but the technicians say nothing. Gregor whistles under his breath, Theo merely picks. Defeated, she carries her tray of teeth upstairs to the office.
She has a school tour at four, once more into the dusky push-button Cretaceous, round and round the cycad trees with a thousand children, her voice unreeling. Then she will go back to the house.

She has to be there early, since this is the first weekend Nate’s children are going to spend with them. She’s been dreading it all week.

“But there’s nowhere for them to sleep,” she said.

“They can borrow sleeping bags from their friends,” Nate said.

Lesje said they didn’t have enough plates. Nate said the children would hardly expect a formal dinner. He would do all the cooking, he said, and the children would wash the dishes. She wouldn’t have to do anything extra at all. Lesje then felt she was being excluded, but did not say so. Instead she counted the silverware and agonized over the baked-in grime on the floors. When she lived with William she would have hooted with scorn over such scruples. The truth was that she didn’t want the children to go home and report to Elizabeth that she had no silverware and the floors were dirty. She hadn’t cared what William thought of her, but she cares desperately how she will appear to two young children she doesn’t even know and has no special reason to like. They have no special reason to like her, either. They probably think she’s stolen Nate. They probably hate her. She feels condemned in advance, not for anything she’s actually done, but for her ambiguous position in the universe.

On Thursday she went to Ziggy’s and bought a bagful of delicacies: English shortbread in a tin, two kinds of cheese, chopped liver, fruit buns, chocolates. She almost never eats fruit buns or chocolates, but she’d snatched them off the shelves in desperation: surely this was what children liked. She realized she didn’t have any idea of what children liked. Most of them liked dinosaurs, which was all she knew.

“That’s not necessary, love,” Nate said when she was disgorging
the contents of her Ziggy’s bag onto the kitchen table. “They’ll be just as happy with peanut butter sandwiches.”

Lesje ran upstairs, threw herself onto their mattress and cried silently, breathing in the smell of old cloth, old stuffing, mice. That was another thing: the children would see this mattress.

After a while Nate came in. He sat down and rubbed her back. “You know how important it is to me that you should all get along,” he said. “If you had kids, you’d understand.”

Lesje’s belly clenched: she could feel it, a wall of muscle around a central hollow. He’d placed himself and the children, and Elizabeth too, in a tight verdant little oasis where such things as understanding were possible. In the desert without, isolated, single, childless and culpably young, she was made to stand in penance, watching a pantomime she could not decipher.

Nate had no idea he was being cruel. He thought he was being helpful. He stroked her back; she could imagine him looking at his watch to see if he’d done it for the required length of time.

Multituberculata
, Lesje murmurs to herself. A soothing word. She wants to be soothed; she is not soothed. She dreads this evening. She dreads the thought of sitting at her own rickety table, with its inadequate silverware and cheap plates, feeling her jaws move, making awkward conversation or staring at her hands while two pairs of eyes watch her in judgment. Three pairs.

E
lizabeth sits in the underground gloom of the Pilot Tavern, breathing in the smell of slightly stale French fries, watching the shadows. She spent several evenings with Chris here, once upon a time. It was a good place for them to go because they were unlikely to see anyone Elizabeth knew. She’s chosen it now for the same reason.

The waiter has come for her order, but she said she was waiting for someone. Which is true. She has kissed her children good night, left out doughnuts and Coke for the baby-sitter, called a taxi and climbed into it, all so she can sit here in the Pilot Tavern and wait. Already she’s regretting it. But she’d kept the card, that business card, tucked into the compartment of her purse where she stores her change and the folder for her identity cards. She knows she doesn’t keep things like this unless she intends, sometime, to use them. An available body, stuck in the back of her mind.

She can still leave, but what then? She’d have to go back, pay off the baby-sitter, and lie down alone in the house that is empty but not empty, listening to the barely audible breathing of her children.
When they’re awake she can stand it. Though they’re hardly great company. Nancy lies inert on her bed, listening to records or reading the same books over and over again:
The Hobbit, Prince Caspian
. Janet hangs around Elizabeth with offers of help: she will peel the carrots, she’ll clear the table. She complains of stomach aches and isn’t satisfied unless Elizabeth gives her some Gelusil or Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia, from Nate’s abandoned bottles. Nancy, on the other hand, slips from Elizabeth’s arms, avoiding hugs and good-night kisses. Sometimes Elizabeth thinks the children are acting guilty rather than sad.

What’s she supposed to say? Daddy hasn’t exactly left, he’s just left. Mummy and Daddy both love you. Nothing is your fault. You know he phones you every night, when he remembers. And you’ve seen him on weekends, several times. But she and Nate have agreed she won’t discuss the separation with the children until he himself has a chance to have a talk with them, a talk he’s so far postponed. Which hardly matters. The children aren’t fools, they know what’s going on. They know it so well they aren’t even asking questions.

The man in the brown suit is hanging over the table; he’s bigger than she remembers, and he’s no longer wearing a brown suit. His suit is light grey and he has on a tie with large white lozenges on it that seem to glow in the dark. He’s become more prosperous.

“See you got here,” he says. He lowers himself into the chair opposite her, sighs, turns his head for the waiter.

When she called, he hadn’t remembered who she was. She had to remind him about their meeting in the subway station, their conversation about real estate. Then he’d been too effusive: “Of course! Of course!” She found this lapse of his humiliating. And then his laugh, thick as gravy, as if he knew what she wanted.

He cannot really know. All she wants is oblivion. Temporary but complete: a night with no stars, a road running straight to a cliff
edge. A termination.
Terminal
. Before calling him, she was sure he could offer this. Perhaps he can. His hands are on the table, blunt, dark-haired, practical.

“I’ve been on the trail,” he says. “Just got back the day before yesterday.” The waiter comes and he orders himself a rum and Coke, then asks Elizabeth what she’ll have. “A Scotch and soda for the lady.” He explains how exhausted he is. The only thing that breaks the monotony of the long drives he has to make is his CB radio. You can get quite a few good conversations going on that. Playfully, he asks Elizabeth to guess what his handle is. Elizabeth demurs. “The Hulk,” he says, smiling a little shyly.

Elizabeth seems to remember that, earlier, he had flown rather than driven. Either way, a traveling salesman. Someone has to sell things, she supposes; nevertheless she’s well on her way to becoming part of an outworn joke. Surely she can do better than this. But she doesn’t want to. Better than this is Philip Burroughs, the friends of friends, the husbands of friends, well tailored, predictable. This man has a suitcase full of crotchless underpants, a halo of sleazy joy.
Carnival
. No circumspection for him, he won’t take off his watch first and prop it on the night table, fold his undershirt, smell of peppermint, the tablets he’s chewed for his ulcer. He’s confident, he leans back, he breathes unspoken promises. For someone else he would be predictable, but not for her; not yet.

The drinks come and Elizabeth gulps hers like medicine, hoping to feel lust bloom like a desert flower between her thighs. The man in the grey suit leans across the table and tells her in a confidential voice that he’s thinking of selling his house. His wife has a new one in mind, something farther north, a little larger. Maybe she knows someone who might be interested? The house he’s selling has all-new copper wiring and he’s had the floors wall-to-walled. He feels he can afford the move; he’s added a new line. Notions.

“Notions?” Elizabeth says. Her body sits on the plastic-cushioned bench like a sandbag; heavy, dry, inanimate.

“For birthday parties,” he says. Miniature helicopters, whistles, soft plastic skulls, monsters, toy wristwatches. That sort of thing. He asks her how her children are.

“Actually my husband and I have separated,” she says. Perhaps this news will arouse in him the predatory responses that the words
separated
and
divorced
are supposed to bring out in married men. But it seems only to make him nervous. He glances around, ostensibly to look for the waiter. It strikes Elizabeth that he’s no more eager to be seen with her than she is to be seen with him. Could he possibly think she’s after him, wants him for domestic use? Preposterous. But it would be insulting to tell him so.

She wonders if she could try being honest with him.
All I’m interested in is a one-night stand. One hour if possible, and you don’t have to talk to me. No strings, no lines, no hooks, I don’t want to add to the clutter. I don’t want you in my life; that’s why I called you
.

But he begins telling her about an operation he had two months ago, for plantar warts. A lot more painful than you might think. It’s no use, she might as well cut her losses. The time for this is over: pickups in the park, fumbling in the movies. She’s forgotten the knack, the trick. How to want.

“I think it’s time for me to go,” she says politely. “Thank you so much for the drink. It’s been a pleasure seeing you again.” She slides her sweater-coat around her shoulders and stands up, easing herself out from behind the table.

He looks dismayed. “The night’s young,” he says. “Have another.”

When Elizabeth declines, he scrambles to his feet. “I’ll give you a lift home, anyhow.”

Elizabeth hesitates, then accepts. Why pay a taxi? They walk to the parking lot through the warm air. He puts his hand on her elbow,
a strangely old-fashioned gesture. Perhaps they could fox-trot, under the parking-lot lights. Her night on the town.

In his car, Elizabeth doesn’t strain herself to make conversation. She tells him where she lives and gives semi-attentive murmurs while he complains about the poor quality of hotel food, especially in Thunder Bay. She’s stone cold sober. Stone cold. There’s some compensation: she’s out of it cleanly, no harm done. He must realize she isn’t interested. He stops talking and switches on his CB radio, twiddling the dial. Staccato voices crackle and fade.

But before he reaches her street, he turns the car into a dead end and stops it abruptly. The headlights rest on a checkerboard, a black arrow; beyond, a high wire fence. A factory of some sort.

“This isn’t my street,” Elizabeth says. At the beginning of the evening she would have welcomed this move.

“Don’t play dumb,” he says. “We both know what you’re here for.” He reaches down and unhooks the microphone from his radio. “We’ll give them a thrill,” he says. “Ten-four, ten-four, gimme a break.”

Elizabeth fumbles for the push button on the seat belt, but before she can unlatch it he falls on her. Elizabeth, head forced back by the weight of his mouth, gasps for air. One knee is between her thighs, shoving her skirt up; his rump is squeezed against the glove compartment. There’s something cold and metallic pressing against her throat and she realizes it’s the microphone.

He thrashes, moans; his elbow flails the window. Elizabeth fights suffocation.
He’s having a heart attack
. She’ll be stuck here, under the body, until they hear her screams over the microphone and come to dig her out.

But in less than a minute his face collapses against her neck and he lies inert. Elizabeth works her left arm up, forcing an air hole.

“Wow,” he says, pushing himself off her. “Great stuff.”

Elizabeth pulls her skirt down over her knees. “I’ll walk home,” she says. She can hear her voice shaking, though she doesn’t think she’s frightened. Idiot, to have expected more.

“Hey, don’t you want your turn?” the man says. His hand scampers like a spider up her thigh. “I’m good,” he says. “Take a break and enjoy yourself.” His left hand holds the microphone, as if he’s expecting her to sing.

“Get your hand off my crotch,” Elizabeth says. She feels as if she’s opened a serious-looking package and a wind-up snake has jumped out. She’s never appreciated practical jokes.