Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (26 page)

“Well that was very nice of him. After all,” said Viola encouragingly.

But Blair King laughed.

“I
know
. Introduce me to his mother. And his sister, he said. Eventually we did come to a house or rather a door, that was all I noticed because you know how the walls all run together. And we were in a little bare room with a couch and a bright bulb. Wait a minute, he said, and he went through another door. His friend stayed behind. I didn't like the friend at all. He had a sullen face. He didn't talk. I sat on the couch and after a long time No.
I
came back and said he was sorry, his mother and sister had gone to bed. Then he said he was going out to get some food. I said could he take me back and he said later. So he left me again with this friend and no sooner was he gone than peculiar things started to happen. The friend came over and sat on the couch and started stroking my hands and arms and trying to talk to me. I tried to keep control and ask him—well,
normalizing
, questions, but I was getting very nervous. I believed now it was a setup between them. I really was very nervous. He began sort of crawling over me there on the couch so I had to get up, and then he just dropped all pretense and cornered me against the wall and took out a knife—”

“Ahhh,” cried Viola. “How could you go to such a country?”

“And he held it under my throat and demanded—well, by this time he was getting very graphic about the whole
thing, but I just said no,
no
, and refused to look at
any
thing.”

“But the knife was at your throat,” said Blair King, almost as if this was a joke.

“Well I somehow did think he was bluffing. I somehow could tell. It was all like a play. And then the blue-eyed one came back. He really had gone to buy food; he had some cheese and so on, and he got very annoyed or seemed to when he saw what was going on. The other one put the knife away of course. The blue-eyed one apologized with great eloquence and we all sat down and ate. It seems incredible. Then the blue-eyed one said he would show me the way back. And he did. He was very courteous. On the way back he asked me to marry him.”

When she said this Jeanette's voice dipped with embarrassment, as it had not done during any other part of the story.

“He was hoping I would get him out of the country or something. Or maybe it's a kind of extreme Arab courtesy. He came to the hotel every day until I left and repeated his proposal. He said he loved me, naturally.”

What is there here that is not being told? thought Dorothy. She had had a great deal of experience listening to the voices of children who were leaving things out. Maybe she slept with the blue-eyed Arab when she got him back to the hotel. Maybe she slept with both of them in the Arab house. Something more than that. Maybe she loved him. Maybe the whole story is made-up.

“I think,” said Jeanette apologetically, “I think I was a little in love with him. Very odd things happen to your feelings in those countries. And being alone.”

“Odd things happen,” Blair King agreed.

“Of course the impossible thing is to tell what they feel about you. Impossible.”

She and Blair King had drunk almost the entire bottle of gin between them.

Dorothy got ready for bed. She felt restless and not at all tired, though it was far past her usual bedtime. If this is what a drink is going to do to me, she thought, then I had better not get in the habit. She heard Viola go to the bathroom and go back to her room and shut the door. She heard Viola's light click out. She put out her own light. Jeanette was sleeping downstairs. No sound in the house.

Dorothy sat on the bed in her long nightgown, with her hair, which was worn coiled up in the daytime, lying like a stiff gray broom, still fairly thick, around her shoulders. She could after a while make out her old face in the glass. There was a moon. She looked like a character to scare children, like an old Norse witch. The sight was enough to make her decide to go downstairs to get a glass of milk or a cup of tea, to bring herself back to normal.

She went down in her bare feet, with her old maroon dressing gown tied over her nightdress. She did not turn on any lights. She could see by the moon in the back rooms of the house and by the street light in the front. She unlocked the front door and went down the steps.

She stood on the sidewalk in her dressing gown, her pale nightdress trailing underneath, and thought,
What if anybody should see?
She walked around the house on the grass. The grass was heavily damp. August dew. She walked past the spirea bushes and stood by the flower border from which all the delphiniums had been cut. There was no fence or hedge between this yard and the Kings'. On the other side of the border the Kings' ragged grass began.

The Kings had a glassed-in porch at the back of their house. The light was on in it. The porch had been renovated a few years ago and the windows now came right down to the floor.

Dorothy walked across the flower border, trying not to step on plants. She stood on the Kings' grass. In the lighted porch she could see two figures, and when she walked closer she could see they were Jeanette and Blair King. Jeanette
seemed to be kneeling on some sort of low stool or hassock. She was pulling her embroidered blouse over her head. Then she was bare. Blair King, standing apart, was removing his clothes too, taking his time. Of course. Nowadays it was nothing to do that. This was what Dorothy had set in motion but she need not worry. They would have forgotten it themselves by tomorrow. Or by a week from tomorrow. Wouldn't they? You could hardly say they loved each other, and they were drunk as sailors.

Blair King knelt down in front of Jeanette, pressing his face against her. She bent over him and held his head. Her tanned body looked golden in the porch light, his white. Pressed together. Dorothy was finally halted. Her breath drew in at the sight of them. Now that they had put their clothes, and what looks and movements she knew of them—all they could give her to know—aside, they seemed strange and familiar to her, both more and less than themselves. Like figures in a museum. But too live, too awkward—even if she could have kept them still!—for that. Flaunting themselves in the light as if nothing mattered, guzzling and grabbing now, relishing and plundering each other. If she had been able to call out to them,
Stop that, stop that at once!
in her old schoolyard voice, it would have been a warning she called, more than a rebuke. Bold as they were, they looked helpless to her, helpless and endangered as people on a raft pulled out on the current. And nobody could call to them. They tumbled, they caught and bore each other down silently, behind the glass.

She noticed now that her whole body was trembling, her knees weak, her head battered from within. She wondered if this was how a person felt at the onset of a stroke. It would be terrible to have a stroke here, in her nightclothes, and not even on her own property. She made her way back through the flower bed and around to the front of the house. She felt better as she walked, and by the time she reached the steps she felt fairly satisfied that she was not going to have a
stroke after all. She sat on the steps for a few moments to get control of herself, closing her eyes.

On the underside of her eyelids there promptly appeared the two welded figures, solid and bright, like those chalked-in drawings she used to put on the blackboard—surprising herself—for festive occasions.

What if Viola had seen any of that? More than she could stand. Strength is necessary, as well as something like gratitude, if you are going to turn into a lady peeping Tom at the end of your life.

The Spanish Lady
 

I tear those letters off, both of them, crumple them and put them in the tiny receptacle for waste paper. Everything in the roomette is well-planned, adequate. In this cubicle of metal and upholstery a human being could without real inconvenience or discomfort pass a life. The train is westbound out of Calgary. I sit watching the brown oceanic waves of dry country rising into the foothills and I weep monotonously, seasickly. Life is not like the dim ironic stories I like to read, it is like a daytime serial on television. The banality will make you weep as much as anything else.

Girl friend. Mistress
. Nobody says mistress any more, that I know of. Girl friend sounds brash, yet has a spurious innocence, is curiously evasive. The possibilities of mystery and suffering that hung around the old-fashioned word have entirely disappeared. Violetta could never have been anybody's girl friend. But Nell Gwyn could, she was more modern.

Elizabeth Taylor: mistress.

Mia Farrow: girl friend.

This is exactly the sort of game Hugh and Margaret and I would have taken up in our old evenings together, or more likely Margaret and I would have taken it up, amusing then irritating Hugh with our absorption in it.

Neither word would hang well on Margaret.

Last spring we went downtown to buy her a new dress. I was amused and touched by her thriftiness, her cautious taste. She is a rich girl, she lives in the Uplands with her old mother, but she drives a six-year-old Renault, dented along one side, she carries sandwiches to school, she wishes not to give offense.

I tried to persuade her to buy a long straight dress, heavy dark green cotton with gold and silver embroidery.

“It makes me feel like a courtesan,” she said. “Or like somebody trying to look like a courtesan, which is worse.”

We left the shop and went to a department store where she bought a rose-colored wool with three-quarter sleeves and self-covered buttons and belt, the sort of dress she always wore, in which her tall flat-chested figure appeared as usual dry, shy, unyielding. Then we went to a secondhand bookshop, and decided to buy each other presents. I bought her
Lala Rookh
and she bought me a copy of
The Princess
, from which we recited to each other as we walked down the street:

   
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.…

   We were often giddy, like high school girls. Was this normal, when you come to think of it? We made up stories about people we saw on the street. We laughed so hard we had to sit down on a bus-stop bench, and the bus came, and we still laughed, waving it on. The edge of hysteria. We were attracted to each other because of the man, or to the man because of each other. I used to go home worn out from talking,
from laughing, and say to Hugh, “It's ridiculous. I haven't had a friend like this in years.”