The Chrome Suite (23 page)

Mr. Kruik, the efficient, brisk-mannered motel owner, is behind the counter in the office and hands them the key to the room Amy always requests, the one at the very end of the units, facing the water and a large outcrop of rock. He tells them that the kitchen is still open if they hurry and so they go straight to the dining room without bothering to park and unpack.

They’re the only people sitting in the cool, dimly lit interior. Feeling sticky and weary, they’re content to lean back into their chairs and passively watch the panorama of the end-of-the-day activities through the wall of tinted windows. Several bare-backed children skip stones, and the black Lab prances and dives where the stones dimple the water’s surface. Clouds begin to change from pink to deep oranges and reds, their bottoms heavy and ballooning down to meet the horizon of the North Channel. Amy and Piotr watch as the waitress fills their wine glasses. They lift them in a toast to the end of the day.

Later, their stomachs full, and slightly light-headed from the wine, they decide to walk and regain their equilibrium, hoping to banish the humming sound of tires and the drone of the engine from their ears. They follow a path they know well. It cuts through bush
at the side of their motel unit down to the water’s edge. They skirt the shoreline, climbing up and over granite slabs jutting out into the water. They emerge at the highway, cross it, and head down towards a modern two-storey building.
CRAFTS OF THE NATIONS
, its sign proclaims. Passengers begin to stream from a Greyhound charter tour bus in the parking lot. As they enter the store, Piotr goes off to look at the tooled leather belts but stops instead to try on an expensive anorak, which he won’t buy, Amy knows, though he insists, nonetheless, that she watch as he tugs it down around his hips and turns slowly in the full-length mirror. The bus passengers begin to enter the store and mill around. Amy overhears the driver talking with one of the store clerks about the barricade at Tobermory, how it has thrown a monkey wrench into the tour. He hasn’t told the passengers yet. As people crowd about Amy she hears foreign languages, smells garlic and, fish. Hands reach for and examine billfolds covered in various tartans. Sun-catchers – bevelled-glass trinkets in geometric shapes – clank together as people turn them and exclaim over the wildflowers pressed inside.

The tourists haven’t yet discovered the second floor where there are more crafts and a gallery of lithographs, and so Amy escapes up there and wanders about the almost empty loft among shelves filled with raw lye soap, beeswax candles, dried weed arrangements. She picks up a round ivory-coloured box from a shelf and admires the look of the quills decorating it in a precise arrangement, a star inside a circle. Interwoven among the quills are strands of sweetgrass. She opens the box and inhales. The whispering sound of denim thighs moving startles her as she realizes that she’s not alone. Her eyes meet the eyes of a person standing on the other side of the shelf. She sees long, black, slightly matted hair and recognizes the red plaid jacket of the hitchhiker, the man they had seen on the ferry. He smiles but not at her. It appears to be his natural expression. Bad
teeth, she notes, as he laughs aloud and jiggles something in his hand. Then his head dips forward as he tosses whatever it is he has in his hand into his mouth.

“I see you managed to get a ride,” Amy says.

He blinked at her. She had startled him. Daydreaming, she supposed, of sitting at the window at the Husky station just outside of Ignace, looking out over the iron-coloured hills and yellow tamarack; such a stark contrast to what he’d seen from the ferry that day, the band of clear water and sky. He blinked and saw her in front of him, realized that she had spoken to him
.

“What?” he asked, pulling a wad of cotton from his ear.

“I saw you earlier today. Beside the highway. Been on the road for long?” She speaks to him through a display of English bone-china ballroom dancers.

“A day and a half. Outa Owen Sound. Took a whole day and a half to get this far.”

“You from Owen Sound?” More Prairie or Maritime than central Canada, she thinks. He has the look.

He shook his head at her indicating no, and poked the cotton wad back inside his ear. Perhaps, when he was in the iron-coloured hills in Ignace, he craved the sight of water and how the sun changed the light against its surface, breaking it into particles as bright as fire, white fire that he could barely look into, and, perhaps, once he’d seen it, he craved equally to be in Ignace and feel the trees and hills surround him
.

Amy waits for him to say more and is disappointed when he doesn’t. She wants a clue to this person so that she can begin to rearrange and shape him, mimic his manner of speech – a story for Piotr later on, one of the stories that he loves for her to tell and listens to carefully, laughing at the right places.

“I guess it’s not as easy to get rides as it used to be in the Sixties.” She realizes with chagrin that he probably wasn’t around during that decade.

“What?” Once again he blinks as though startled. She notices how his jaw moves sideways as he chews, rather, than up and down.

“People aren’t as willing to pick up hitchhikers now.”

“I have to get to Ignace by tomorrow.” He speaks louder than necessary. His eyes shift suddenly and fix steadily on her face.

“You live there?”

There’s movement behind his face, it’s as though he’s having an argument with himself over what to say next. “Yes,” he says finally and then runs his fingers through his matted hair, shaking it into place. His face becomes still and unreadable.

Strange person, Amy thinks, as she backs away from the shelf of figurines. “Well,” she says brightly as she turns to leave. “I guess we’re lucky we got this far, eh? Seems we got the last ferry going for a while.”

“Don’t leave your headlights on,” he calls down to her as she descends the stairs.

Weird person up there, Amy will tell Piotr.

She imagines him, the hitchhiker: sitting in the Husky restaurant outside of Ignace in his booth across from the cash-register counter, close to the doorway. Perhaps every single day he recognizes someone, but they rarely recognize him. When he hitched up and down the strip of highway that was his, moving once every month between Ignace and Owen Sound, he recognized the licence-plate numbers of the four-by-fours, the pick-ups, the swaying rust buckets of the locals, but mostly the compact Japanese imports like the one she drives, a silver Nissan SX
.

It is likely that he had seen her before that day on the road with Piotr. He could have seen her at the Husky station where she and Piotr may have stopped for gas on one of their several trips between Winnipeg and Toronto
.
Where the hitchhiker waited for his shift to begin and drank coffee and watched travellers pull in off the highway and cross the apron of cement surrounding the restaurant. “Don’t forget to turn off your headlights,” he’d said as she went down the stairs in the giftshop. And it could have happened. She could have forgotten to turn off the headlights of the silver Nissan and he’d noticed. “You’ve gone and left your headlights on,” he’d said and watched her eyes widen with gratitude
.

Amy looks for Piotr and then hears his voice rising above the murmur of many voices. He speaks rapidly, unusually loud and animated, in Polish. She’s irritated by this. She hears the same animation, vitality, when he speaks long distance to the woman in Brussels. The story of the weird man upstairs disappears from her mind as she wanders among the giftware, listening for familiar-sounding Polish words that will give her a clue to what they’re talking about with so much energy. Walesa, she hears the name.
Tak, tak, tak
, she thinks. Damn. When this happens there is nothing she can do but wait.

Still damp from the shower, Amy wraps a towel around herself and joins Piotr on the couch. He flicks through the television channels in search of news. The faces of native people appear behind a tangle of barbed wire at a barricade, then the knowing smile of Sam the bartender on “Cheers,” three seconds of an old movie. He flicks through channels until he finds news of Poland. Then he hunkers down, legs crossed, hand cupping his mouth and chin. Like the day she first met him six years ago at an orientation meeting. They had both been selected for training at the film institute. He was sitting like that, his posture saying he was being defensive. Amy was late, there was only one empty chair, the one beside him, and when she sat down she smelled his strong odour. His eyes were almond-shaped, tiny and dark. Seed-shaped, she thought, Mongolian-looking. When
she stood to shake hands, his palm was too moist, his smile enigmatic, and she noticed that they were almost the same height. “I don’t want to work with this person,” she later told the powers that be. “He can barely speak English, for God’s sake. We’re supposed to be able to communicate.” But she could understand everything he said perfectly. She couldn’t explain that his odour and intensity frightened her. The first thing Piotr said to Amy was, “I am very sorry but I don’t like your script.” And she replied, “Well, I’m very sorry too, but I can’t take very seriously the opinion of someone who can’t read the language.” Six months later, they were living together.

At the end of the first year, she finally took Piotr to meet Margaret in Carona. Amy walked behind them in the garden at the back of the Grandview Apartments and watched how Piotr thought to offer Margaret his arm as they walked along the path between the strawberries. Amy thought it was strange how Margaret, who had never in her entire life grown a garden, demanded one then. She requested that the developer, who owned a vacant lot behind the apartment, have it ploughed up for the tenants who wanted to grow gardens. Piotr, attentive and soft-spoken, leaned forward to catch Margaret’s every word as she poured tea and served sponge cake and strawberries in her tiny apartment.

He was thinking about his own mother, Amy realized, by the way he scanned the room, his expression extraordinarily tender as he took in the stiff crocheted doilies spread across shiny surfaces, the bric-a-brac carefully set down in their centres. He had just learned that his passport would not be renewed and had received an official letter requesting that he return to Poland. He had decided to ignore it. He didn’t believe in Gorbachev’s new word “perestroika” and he thought then that he’d never be able to return to his country. He rose to examine the photographs on the buffet. “My children’s school pictures,” Margaret explained as though Amy wasn’t one of them. Margaret joined him to point out a young and well-scrubbed
Mel; Amy, pug-nosed and buck-toothed. Her voice dropped when she said “Jill,” and Amy felt the air in the room quiver.

When Piotr first heard the word “glasnost” he said he didn’t trust it. But Amy thought that he both wanted and didn’t want to believe in the immunity of the demonstrators they had watched, thousands of people teeming through the streets of Warsaw. Part of him wanted it to be true because he remembered too well the tanks rolling in and martial law thwarting his desire to study filmmaking in the United States. But he also didn’t want to believe in the word “glasnost” because it changed things. It interfered, she suspected, with the vision that had driven him: of earning the stature of a major filmmaker and of fame affording him special status, the privilege of being able to move freely between his home country and the free world. Now, supposedly, the whole world is free.

He’s lost in the flickering images of people milling about in the market place, complaining that prices are climbing too fast, beyond their means, and so Amy gets up and goes over to the bed that is heaped with their belongings. She clears it off in the event that this is one of those nights when he’ll sleep alone with a pillow over his head, body tucked into the fetal position and twitching with nightmares.

“Want a beer?” He nods quickly, indicating his desire for silence so that he won’t miss any of the news. She goes into the bathroom and puts on her robe. She fluffs her wet hair. She believes that she looks younger than she is. In any case, she often tells herself, her body is young. The absence of cellulite, stretch marks, is reassuring. She didn’t breast-feed Richard and so the skin of her breasts is still fairly elastic and smooth. She dabs gloss on her mouth, plucks two beers cooling on ice in the sink, and steps back into the room. Piotr is gone. She sees him then, through the window, his silhouette against the sky as he stands out on the rock. He’s walked out as far as
he can to the edge of the outcrop with its sheer fifteen-foot drop into the water. It’s dark, she thinks. He might trip over a fissure or a lichen-encrusted node. Don’t fall. Don’t jump.

Piotr turns, places his hands on his hips, and looks back into the room. The bathroom light shines behind her; he can see her, she knows. His citizenship card, the airline ticket he purchased in Toronto lie on the foot of the bed. Maybe, she thinks, he’s brave. The brave arrow in Rilke’s
Elegies
, collecting his energy to free himself from this, his first love. Shooting away, not remaining, being brave enough to have “no place to stay.” All right then, Go, she thinks, and nudges him with her eyes over the side of the rock.

June
25,
1991
, Amy writes the date in her notebook. Piotr is in the shower, face turned up to its tepid stream, eyes closed. She must be careful how to write about this day. She wants to get it straight, to be a knife paring down to the bone of this day so that when she rereads the entry she can trust it to be an accurate recording. They are both marginal people, she has come to realize. He, living in a culture he was not born into, she in one of her own making; Piotr has become her country. She smells him in the mound of clothing on the chair beside the desk. The room is dark except for the light of the lamp spilling across the clean page. She turns the lamp off for a moment, listening to the stream of water in the shower, the sound of a television in the unit next door. As her eyes grow accustomed to the darkness, the outside landscape emerges. A faint wash of light bands the horizon above the water; to the right, headlights press through the darkness on the highway. A car approaches and for several seconds she sees captured in the headlights a person standing beside the road. The hitchhiker? she wonders, and tries not to feel smug about being where she is, in the clean, friendly room, while he, the matted-haired
slightly weird person, must face the night in the open, alone. God, she thinks, and turns the light back on, don’t do that. She must not forget what it was like to be him, on the road and alone.