Life Before Man (37 page)

She knelt beside the tub, clutching the knife she’d snatched from the counter on her way past. Unfortunately it was a grapefruit knife.
She would have to saw rather than slash, which wasn’t the effect she’d had in mind. But the end result would be the same. Nate would break down the door, when he got around to it, and find her floating in a sea of pink. Warm water, she knew, made it come out faster. He’d smell the salt, the dead bird smell. What would he do then? With her effigy, waxen and staring.

But this wasn’t really what Lesje wanted to do. After a while of thinking about it she stashed the grapefruit knife in the medicine cabinet. Nate hadn’t even seen her take it; otherwise he’d be up there pounding at the door. (Wouldn’t he?) She was still angry though. With some deliberation, she flushed the remaining pills in her green plastic dial-a-pill dispenser down the toilet. When Nate came to bed she turned to him and put her arms around him, exactly as if she’d forgiven him. If children were the key, if having them was the only way she could stop being invisible, then she would goddamn well have some herself.

In the morning she was unrepentant. She knew she’d committed a wrong and vengeful act, an act so vengeful she could not have imagined herself doing such a thing a year ago. Surely no child conceived in such rage could come to much good. She would have a throwback, a reptile, a mutant of some kind with scales and a little horn on the snout. It’s long been her theoretical opinion that Man is a danger to the universe, a mischievous ape, spiteful, destructive, malevolent. But only theoretical. Really she believed that if people could see how they were acting they would act some other way. Now she knows this isn’t true.

She would not recant. Nate, ignorant of what was in store for him, ate corn flakes and made conversation. It was raining, he noted. Lesje, gnawing a bran muffin, hair falling over her face, peered out at him like Fate, sullen, gauging. When would her body strike?

“I’d just like you to realize,” she said, to let him know she was still at large, had not been caged and propitiated, “that if you die Elizabeth gets your body. I’ll have it sent to her in a crate. After all she’s still your wife.”

Nate treated this as a joke.

Winding down the stairs, hands held quiet in her raincoat pockets, she vacillates. She has a narrow pelvis, she’ll die in childbirth, she knows nothing about children, what about her job? Even with Nate working part time they can’t afford it. It isn’t too late, nothing can have happened so soon. She’ll crack open another package, take two pills and a hot bath, and everything will go on as before.

But then she thinks: Not this time. She wants no more encounters, spurious or otherwise, with the grapefruit knife.

Under the golden dome, head down, steering for the door, she feels a touch on her arm. Nate, she hopes, bringing reconciliation, capitulation, a graceful way out. But instead it is William.

“I just happened to be in the Museum,” he says, “and I thought I’d look you up.”

Lesje knows perfectly well that William never just happens to be anywhere, much less the Museum. Wonderful, transparent William, easy to read as a phone book, everything in alphabetical order. He has something to say to her, therefore he’s come to say it. He didn’t telephone first because he knew she might refuse to see him. Quite right, she would have. But now she smiles, she grins.

“I was just going up to Murray’s for some lunch,” she says. She will not alter anything for William.

William, although he thinks Murray’s is grubby and the food will give you cancer of the colon, says that in that case does she mind if he joins her? Not at all, Lesje says, and it’s true, she doesn’t mind. William is now safely in the past. She walks beside him, air
filling her bones. It’s pure joy to be with someone who cannot affect her.

Lesje has a chopped egg sandwich and a cigarette. William has a Western. What he feels, he says, dabbing buttery crumbs, is that enough time has gone by and he would just like her to know that he realizes he didn’t behave very well, at the end, if she knows what he means. His blue eyes regard her candidly, his pink cheeks glow.

Lesje does not mistake this verbal construction of William’s for true repentance. Rather it’s an entry on William’s balance sheet, that balance sheet required by London, Ontario, that little page William carries around in his head on which everything must eventually tot up right. One attempted rape, one apology. But Lesje by now is willing to accept a convention of decency. Once she would have demanded sincerity.

“I guess nobody behaved very well,” she says.

William is relieved, and glances at his watch. He will stay another ten minutes, she calculates, doing the thing properly. He has not really wanted to see her. Right now he’s thinking about something else and she finds, trying to guess, that she does not know what it is.

She cups her hand across her face, watches him through the smoke. It dismays her that she can no longer judge William as easily, as glibly as she once could. What she wants to ask him is: Have you changed? Have you learned anything? She herself feels she has learned more than she ever intended to, more than she wants. Does he find her different?

She studies his face: perhaps it is thinner. She can’t remember. And those sky-blue eyes, they are not the eyes of a Caucasian doll, a hat mannequin, as she’d once thought.

William sits opposite her, drinking water from a Murray’s glass
with a trace of lipstick on the rim. His fingers hold the glass, his other hand lies on the table, his neck comes out of his shirt collar, which is light green, and on top of that is his head. His eyes are blue and he has two of them. This is the sum total of William in the present tense.

E
lizabeth, hatless but with gloves, is standing in one of the more desirable districts of the Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Near the old family mausoleums, Eaton’s Department Stores, Weston’s Biscuits; not, heaven forbid, in the newer parts with their adolescent trees or in the strange suburban areas of square flat stones with Chinese markings or ornate monuments with plastic-encased photos beside the names.

Two men are shoveling earth onto Auntie Muriel, who, although she’s incinerated all the members of her immediate family she could get her hands on, has chosen to have herself lowered more or less intact into the earth. A roll of green pseudo-sod stands ready to cover the unpleasantly exposed brown earth once Auntie Muriel is safely tamped down.

Elizabeth’s hair blows in the warm breeze. It’s a fine spring day, which is too bad; Auntie Muriel, she is sure, would have preferred a heavy drizzle. But even Auntie Muriel cannot arrange the weather from beyond the grave.

Though she’s managed to arrange almost every other detail of her own funeral and interment. Full instructions were in her will, composed before her death, when she was finally, irrevocably dying. Her coffin and plot had been bought and paid for. Her wardrobe, including the underwear, had been meticulously selected and laid aside, Scotch-taped in tissue paper. (“It’s an old dress,” Elizabeth can imagine her saying. “No sense burying a good one.”) She’d vetoed beautification of her corpse as a waste of money and had opted for a closed coffin. She’d even selected the hymns and Bible readings for the service. They’d been enclosed in a separate sealed envelope, addressed to the church. Elizabeth, knowing this, felt she was hearing Auntie Muriel’s own voice, intransigent as ever, projecting itself through the mouths of the gathered mourners.

Timothy Eaton had found itself embarrassed by Auntie Muriel. In death as doubtless in life, Elizabeth thought, listening to the diffident voice of the young man who had phoned her. “It’s about the service,” he said. “I’m wondering whether you might consider some changes. The selections are a little incongruous.”

“Of course,” Elizabeth said.

“Good,” said the man. “Perhaps we could meet and go over …”

“I mean, of course they’re incongruous,” Elizabeth said. “Didn’t you know her? What did you expect? Let the old reptile get what she wants. She always did in life.” They were inheriting the loot; the least they could do was go through with it, whatever it was.

She thought the man would be offended – she was intending to be offensive – but she was almost sure she heard a snicker at the other end of the line.

“Very well, Mrs. Schoenhof,” the voice said. “We’ll charge ahead.”

Nevertheless, Elizabeth had been unprepared when the organ burst forth with the opening hymn: “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today.”
Was it the old beast letting everyone know she considered herself immortal, or was it just something Auntie Muriel had stuck in because she happened to like it? She glanced around at the surprisingly large group of mourners, old fellow-parishioners, distant relatives: they were singing, gamely though uneasily. After the hymn the minister cleared his throat, rotated his shoulders like a diver warming up, then launched into the Bible reading.

“ ‘How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow. And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning.’’ ”

He was doing his best, rolling the r’s and acting as if he knew what was going on, but a puzzled whispering rose from the congregation. Auntie Muriel was verging on bad taste. She should have chosen something more conventional, grass withering and passing away, everlasting mercy. But fornication, at a funeral? Elizabeth remembered the young minister they’d sacked, with his hot-coal eyes and his fondness for blood-hued suns and rending veils. Perhaps they suspected Auntie Muriel of being one of the same kind, hidden all these years in their midst. Possibly not entirely sane: look at the sister, the niece.

Elizabeth had little doubt that this was a personal message aimed directly at her: Auntie Muriel’s last word on the subject of her mother, fiery death and all, and probably on herself as well. She could imagine Auntie Muriel poring through the Bible, bifocals on the end of her nose, searching for the right verses: scathing, punitive, self-righteous. The joke was that the congregation didn’t realize this. Knowing their habits of mind, Elizabeth felt it was likely they thought Auntie Muriel was repenting, even confessing, in some bizarre way. To a secret life of delicious living.

“ ‘Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her.’ ” The minister shut the Bible and looked up apologetically, and everyone relaxed.

Auntie Muriel had not composed her own eulogy, which laid heavy stress on the words
dedication
and
generosity
. Everyone knew what that meant. Elizabeth let her eyes wander, over to the familiar bronze dead of World War One, then to the other wall.
READY TO EVERY GOOD WORK
. Some female Eaton or other.

But at the final hymn Elizabeth nearly disgraced herself by laughing out loud. Auntie Muriel had chosen “Away in a Manger,” and the faces around Elizabeth shifted rapidly from bewilderment to panic. Voices faltered and stopped, and Elizabeth dropped her face into her cupped hands and snorted. She hoped these snorts would be mistaken for grief.

“Mother, stop laughing,” Janet hissed. But though she kept her mouth closed, Elizabeth could not stop. When the hymn ended and she could raise her head again, she was astonished to see that a number of people were crying. She wondered what they were mourning: it could not possibly be Auntie Muriel.

The children are attached to her hands, Janet on the right, Nancy on the left. They’re wearing their white knee socks and Mary Janes: Janet’s idea, since these were what they wore to visit Auntie Muriel. Janet is weeping decorously; she knows this is what you do at funerals. Nancy is looking around, her head swiveling unabashed. “What’s that, Mum? Why is he doing that?”

Elizabeth herself is dry-eyed and feels slightly giddy. There is still laughter in her throat. Was the service the result of premature senility, or could it be that Auntie Muriel at last had been making a joke? Perhaps she’d planned it for years, that moment of helpless astonishment; gloated over it, picturing the faces of her old associates as they realized that she might be other than what she seemed.
Elizabeth doubts it, but hopes so. Now that Auntie Muriel is actually dead, she is free to restructure her closer to her own requirements; also, she would like to find something in her to approve.

Nate is there, on the other side of the grave. He kept apart from them during the service; perhaps he didn’t want to intrude. He looks across at Elizabeth now and she smiles at him. It was sweet of him to think of coming; she didn’t ask him to. Sweet but not necessary. It occurs to her that Nate in general is not necessary. He can be there or not. Elizabeth blinks, and Nate vanishes; she blinks again and he reappears. She finds herself able to be grateful for his presence. She knows well enough that her momentary gratitude may not lead to anything and will evaporate the next time he’s late picking up the children. Nevertheless, that war is over.
Dismissed
.

“I’m going over to see Dad,” Nancy whispers, letting go of Elizabeth’s hand. Nancy wants the excuse to walk quite near the grave and get a closer look at the men shoveling; but also she wants to be with her father. Elizabeth smiles and nods.

Hilarity is draining from her, leaving her shaky. She’s finding it difficult to believe that Auntie Muriel, now shriveled, boxed, dirted over and done with, actually did all the harmful, even devastating things she remembers her doing. Possibly Elizabeth has exaggerated, invented; but why would she invent Auntie Muriel? Anyway, Auntie Muriel really was like that; Elizabeth should know, she’s got the scars.

Why then can she suddenly not bear to see Auntie Muriel being merged, leveled, as if she’s a flower plot? Prettied over. “She was awful,” Elizabeth wants to say, testify. “She was
awful.”
Auntie Muriel was a phenomenon, like a two-headed calf or Niagara Falls. She would like to bear witness to this fact. She wants it admired; she doesn’t want it diminished or glossed over.