Life Before Man (29 page)

“Hell, I was just trying to be friendly,” he says, withdrawing. He hooks his microphone back on the set. “Everyone likes a bit of fun.”

“Get off the channel, Mac,” says the voice on the radio. “Piss or get off the pot.”

“I’ll walk home,” Elizabeth says again.

“I can’t let you do that,” the man says. “Not around here.” He sits with his hands on his knees, his head bowed; he’s looking at the steering wheel. “I’ve got a nip in the glove compartment,” he says. “Live a little, have one on me. Let’s both have one.” His voice is listless.

“No thanks, really,” Elizabeth says, forced back into politeness. She unlatches the seat belt; this time he makes no move to stop her. Sadness radiates from him like heat, she can see that now, it always has. When she leaves he will probably cry. In some odd, shrunken way he wanted to please her. Whose failure is it that she is not pleased?

Outside there are trees, the wind, then houses. She walks to the first intersection, looking for street names. Behind her she can hear the motor running, but he doesn’t turn, doesn’t pass her. Who is laughing? Something stuck in her throat. Nobody really.

N
ate is out on the front porch, rocking gently in the rocking chair Elizabeth bought for fifteen dollars five years ago at a farm auction near Lloydtown. Before he sold the car. She’d had him paint it white to cover up the split back, wired together through small holes drilled inexpertly in each half. It would do for the front porch, she said. The same rocker, undamaged and stripped, would have been at least fifty dollars, she told him. Now after five years of weather the chair needs sanding and a fresh coat of paint. But if he does it, Elizabeth will ignore it. She’s no longer interested in the furniture.

He holds his mind still and avoids looking along the street to where Elizabeth will soon appear in the late afternoon sunlight, walking through the fallen leaves on her way home from the bus stop. He’s waiting for her, he actually wants to see her. This is a sensation so long forgotten that it’s almost like a new one. His body in the chair feels angular as the chair, his spine tight. Something is about to happen, some beginning, things are about to change, and he isn’t sure he’s ready.

Six days ago she said she wanted to have a little chat with him.
He expected a lecture on some procedure: the dishes, the laundry, who washed what of whose, who folded what, how objects on the floor were supposed to transfer themselves to the proper shelf. That’s what her little chats usually amount to.
Pulling his weight
. He had his defense already prepared: when he does do things she doesn’t notice he’s done them, so how does she know whether he’s pulling his weight or not? He’d delayed, pouring himself a drink, searching for his cigarettes, before sitting down reluctantly opposite her at the kitchen table.

But instead she told him bluntly that she’d stopped seeing Chris. Under the rules they’d agreed on, it was no longer any of his business who she saw. He wanted to remind her of this, of her side of the agreement. “Do what you like,” he’d say. Why was she bothering him about it?

“I want you to do me a favor,” she said before he could speak. Though she demanded justice Elizabeth did not often request favors, not from him, not lately. “If Chris should come around, I don’t want you to let him into the house.”

Nate stared at her. She’d never said anything like this before, presumably because she hadn’t needed to. Her way of disposing of her lovers was usually terminal. He didn’t know what she told them, but when she’d had enough of them they dropped from sight as rapidly, as completely, as if she’d roped a cement block to their legs and heaved them into the harbor. He suspected her of wanting to do the same thing with him – certainly she was fed up with him – but the children prevented her.

He wanted to ask what was wrong: Was Chris likely to come to the house? Why? But she would only say again that her life was her life. Once it had been theirs.

This is what he wants, wants back. This image, of a shared harmonious life, left over from some Christmas card of the forties, a log fire, knitting in a basket, glued-on snow, had been discarded
so long ago by both of them that he’d forgotten about it. Now it was here again, a possibility in the present tense. Perhaps Elizabeth wanted it too, perhaps she was willing to try again. He felt he had to act decisively. She’d often accused him of being unable to act decisively. So he asked Martha out to lunch.

Martha was delighted. At a corner table in the Café Jurgens, her choice, she held his hand and told him how wonderful it was to be able to see him like this, spontaneously, outside the allotted hours. He watched her unhappily while she ate a grilled lobster sandwich and drank two whiskey sours. Behind her was a blown-up photograph of, was it Venice?

“You’re silent today,” Martha said. “Cat got your tongue?”

Nate managed a smile. He was about to tell her he couldn’t see her any more, and he wanted to do it gracefully and calmly. He didn’t even want to do it, exactly, although things had reached an impasse with them lately. But the fact was that with Chris gone there was an imbalance. Martha, too, would have to be jettisoned; otherwise he might end up living with her. Which he didn’t want. It would be much better for everyone if he could fix it up with Elizabeth; better for the children. He felt dismal about this but it was in a good cause. He would try for a clean break. He hoped she wouldn’t scream at him. Vitality, he’d once called it.

But she didn’t scream. She let go of his hand and lowered her head, staring at the crusts of her sandwich. He thought he saw a tear fall into the mayonnaise.

“You need something more,” Nate said, hurriedly debasing himself. “Someone who can …”

“That bitch,” Martha said. “She finally did it, didn’t she? She’s been working at it long enough.”

“What do you mean?” Nate said. “Really, this has nothing to do with Elizabeth, I just think …”

“When are you going to get your own bellybutton back, Nate?” Martha said, almost in a whisper. She raised her eyes, looking him straight in the face. “I bet she even ties your goddamned shoelaces for you.”

To the left there’s a sudden roar, almost like an explosion. Nate’s eyes jerk up. There in front of him, where he hasn’t seen it for over a year (“Do what you like,” he’d told her, “just don’t make me watch”) is Chris’s old white convertible, this time with the top up. Nate expects to see Elizabeth get out of it and come breezing up the walk, over-affable as she always is when she’s got something she wants but he doesn’t. He doesn’t really believe Chris has been banished, not permanently; he’s gone on too long, she’s been too intent on him for that. They’ll be back to square one, where they’ve probably been all the time.

But Chris gets out alone. He comes up the front steps, stumbling a little on the one Nate has been meaning to fix, and Nate is dismayed to see how bludgeoned he looks. He has dark horizontal welts under his eyes, as if he’s been slugged across the face with a belt. His hair straggles, his hands dangle heavily from the sleeves of his crumpled corduroy jacket. He stares down at Nate, the hopeless challenging stare of a drunk about to ask for a handout.

“Hi,” Nate says weakly. He moves to stand up, so they’ll be on the same level, but Chris squats, resting on his heels. He smells of whiskey bottles, used socks, faintly rotting meat.

“You’ve got to help me,” he says.

“Did you lose your job?” Nate asks. A fatuous question perhaps, but what is he supposed to say to his wife’s castoff lover? He certainly can’t order him self-righteously from the porch, now that he’s actually here. He looks so beaten; surely Elizabeth alone could not account for such wreckage.

Chris laughs a little. “I quit,” he says. “I couldn’t stand it, being in the same building with her. I haven’t slept. She won’t even see me.”

“What can I do?” Nate says. Meaning:
What do you expect me to do?
But he genuinely wants to help, anyone witnessing such misery would want to help, though his own knee-jerk sympathy dismays him. The bloody Unitarians again. He should hand Chris over to his mother; she would lecture him on how he should think about the positive things in life instead of dwelling on the gloomy ones. Then she’d put his name on a list, and several weeks later he’d get a parcel in the mail – soap ends extracted from motels, a dozen pairs of children’s socks, a knitted chest protector.

“Make her listen,” Chris says. “She hangs up on me. She won’t even listen.”

Nate remembers now the distant ringing of the phone in the middle of the night, two or three
A.M
., Elizabeth’s half-moon eyes in the mornings. A month at least it’s been going on.

“I can’t make Elizabeth do anything,” Nate says.

“She respects you,” Chris says. “She’ll listen to you.” He looks down at the porch floor, then up at Nate with sudden hatred. “She doesn’t respect me.”

It’s a revelation to Nate that Elizabeth respects him. He doesn’t believe it anyway; it’s a ploy used by Elizabeth against Chris, who is too dim to see through it.

“Tell her,” Chris says belligerently. “She’s got to live with me. I want to marry her. Tell her she has to.”

Warped
, Nate thinks. This is very warped. Does Chris really expect him to order his own wife to run off with another man? “You look as though you need a drink,” he says. He wants one himself. “Come on in.”

Halfway down the hall, Chris following him, he remembers Elizabeth’s plea. Don’t let him into the house. It was a plea, he sees now, not a cool request. She hasn’t renounced Chris; she’s fled because
she’s afraid of him. It would take quite a lot to make Elizabeth afraid for her own safety. She must think he’ll attack her, beat her up. The image of Elizabeth in that grip, white flesh buckling under those fists, powerless, whimpering, is only momentarily erotic.

The back of Nate’s neck tingles. He’s been heading for the kitchen, with its knives and skewers, but turns instead into the living room, wheeling too abruptly.

“Scotch?” he says.

Chris says nothing. He’s leaning in the doorway, smiling: a rat smile, lip lifted back over yellowed teeth. Nate doesn’t feel like turning his back on him to go to the kitchen for glasses, but he can hardly walk backwards. Late-movie scenarios unreel: himself conked with a brass candlestick or one of Elizabeth’s heavy bowls, left unconscious in the hallway; the children kidnapped, held hostage, barricaded and terrified in Chris’s two-roomed hideaway while Chris hunches over his chessboard like the Phantom of the Opera and the police megaphone from doorways; Elizabeth dumped bruised and naked in a culvert, bedsheet knotted round her neck. Preventable, all of it, and his fault; if only he hadn’t …

Even as his own guilt flashes before him, Nate wants to give Chris something, some food, what? A bus ticket somewhere, Mexico, Venezuela, that’s what he himself has often wanted. He wants to reach out, touch Chris on the arm; he searches for some maxim, trite but magical, some parable of hope that will restore Chris in an instant, send him out square-shouldered to face life. At the same time he knows that if Chris makes a move, just one move towards the staircase that leads to the closed door behind which the children were playing, half an hour earlier, an intense game of Admirals, he’ll jump him and pound his head against the banister. He’ll kill him. He’ll kill him with no regrets.

There are footsteps on the porch, resolute, even; the click of the front door. Elizabeth. Now it will explode, Chris will charge her like
a moose in heat, Nate will have to protect her. Otherwise she’ll disappear down the front walk, ass first, slung over Chris’s shoulder, pencils and keys tumbling from her purse. Maybe she would like that, Nate thinks. She used to imply that he himself was not forceful enough.

But “Get out” is all she says. She’s behind Chris, in the hall; from the living room Nate can’t see her. Chris has turned, his face folding, pleating itself like water hit by a rock. When Nate reaches the hall he’s gone. There is only Elizabeth, her mouth set in that tight line of displeasure, pulling her leather gloves off finger by finger.

Watching her, thinking of Chris slinking across the street like a straggler from a defeated army, he knows that at some vague place in the future he himself will need to leave her.

L
esje, balancing her tray, steers towards an empty table surrounded by other empty tables. She no longer finds it easy to come down for coffee with Marianne and Trish or to join them for lunch. They’re still friendly enough, but they’re careful. She can remember this feeling and sympathize with it: those in the midst of crisis are bad luck. They’re curiosities and you talk about them when they aren’t there, but when they are there they silence you. For Marianne and Trish, she’s like static electricity.

Dr. Van Vleet is away; he gets rose fever every year, for which he takes herbal remedies prepared by his wife. Lesje wonders whether she will live long enough with Nate to learn herbal remedies and dose him with them. Or with anyone else. She tries to visualize Nate in an old man’s V-necked cardigan, dozing in the sun, and fails. Dr. Van Vleet often says “in my day.” Lesje wonders if he knew it was his day at the time. She herself does not feel that the time through which she’s presently living is particularly hers.

She wants Dr. Van Vleet to be here. He never listens to gossip, he’s heard nothing about her so-called private life. He’s the only
person she knows who is willing to treat her with amused paternal indulgence, which at the moment she feels very much in need of. He corrects her pronunciation, she laughs at his epigrams. If he were here now, opposite her at the table, she could ask him about something, some technical point, and then she wouldn’t have to think about anything else. The feeding and breeding habits of the Pteranodon, for instance. If a glider rather than a flapper, how did it become airborne? Did it simply wait for a slight breeze to lift it by its twelve-foot wings? Some speculate that because of its incredibly delicate bone structure it would have been unable to touch down anywhere, on water or on land. If so, how did it reproduce? For a moment Lesje glimpses warm tranquil seas, gentle winds, the immense fur-covered pteranodons soaring like wisps of white cotton high overhead. Such visions are still possible, but they don’t last long. Inevitably she sees a later phase: the stench of dying seas, dead fish on the mud-covered shores, the huge flocks dwindling, stranded, their time done. All of a sudden, Utah.