The Journey Prize Stories 24 (10 page)

Amanda’s first meeting alone with Jude happened by chance. She was supposed to meet Arthur for an afternoon drink, but she was late. Arthur waited for Amanda at a corner table of the café down the street from his house. This was his regular place; he took his coffee here every other morning. He liked putting on his suit pants and a dress shirt to walk over and be served.

The wind blew wisps of his white hair as he thought about the girl: she was a bit of an unexpected pleasure, a breeze when you thought all the windows were closed. He was not sure that she was as young as a girl; the precise age of the young eluded him. Regardless, here was a person he could get used to talking to. She had a lovely manner, a nervousness that showed in the movements of the hands, and a habit of staring at a person for moments after he or she has stopped speaking. But that entourage of hers – why did they all travel together like that? Though the mother was lovely. Attuned to the daughter – when the girl saw a fly in her lemonade, the mother’s eyes immediately searched out the waiter. Did the girl see the mother do that? Another time the mother broke the spell of the girl staring at him by asking her a question – to his regret. The mother seemed nervous too. The aunt and the boyfriend were not nervous. When the mother looked for the waiter to inform him of the fly, the boyfriend watched her as if trying
to signal something. She then put down her hand and he went inside the café and returned a minute later with a fresh drink.

The aunt and the mother and the girl resembled each other, and he covertly spent much of their lunch trying to pinpoint the similarities and differences. Around them the girl did not talk very much; that’s why he had enjoyed showing her his house and then their brief stroll alone, yesterday, more than the time with the entire package. He thought he started to understand about the family and about the girl. And so he came on the idea of making her an offer. He hardly ever rented the apartment off-season and he liked talking to the girl. He realized he liked her a lot more than he cared for his daughter-in-law.

But now the girl was late and he was feeling his allergy act up. He had nearly finished his coffee and was starting to feel nauseous, a symptom, he suspected, of a new blood pressure medication. The day was hot and he was growing uncomfortable. When he saw Jude walk by, on his way home for lunch, he waved him down and asked him to be kind enough to wait for the girl and tell her that Arthur had to return home. He put a bill into Jude’s hand and walked away.

Amanda was hurrying along because she had misjudged the time and now realized herself nearly half an hour late. It happened often that half an afternoon passed before she realized that it was no longer morning. When she saw Jude sitting at the café table, she thought that she must have got more badly mixed up, until he explained about his father having to leave. She had mentioned to Millie that she was meeting Arthur for tea and hoped now that no one would see her here and think she had lied. Jude’s smell was a thin edge of cologne mixed with clean coppery sweat; there was sweat at his hairline and on his neck.

“Will you have lunch with us? Lula has made some kind of tuna pasta salad, I think.” Because she said nothing, he added, hesitatingly, “Do you like tuna?”

“Sure,” she said, “thank you.”

If Lula was made uncomfortable by Amanda’s unexpected presence at lunch, Amanda could not discern it. She smiled at Amanda through her sleepy lids and pointed her to a chair. She wore a turquoise dress, and held the boy in one arm as she set the table with the other. As they ate, the boy turned his eyes to Amanda repeatedly, prompting Lula to say, “He likes you,” the first thing she said since the initial hello. Jude was the one keeping up a conversation by asking Amanda what she and the others had visited.

Amanda had no memory for names and dates of art works, or names of streets, and found it impossible to keep talking about places and things she’d seen.

“He seems very bright,” she said of the boy. Shortly after, Lula rose from her seat, put her plate in the sink, and said, to the child rather than either Amanda or Jude, “We’re going for our little walk, aren’t we.” She stopped near Amanda’s chair and said to the boy, “Wave bye-bye to the lady.” With that Jude and Amanda were left at table with their plates still half full. He moved his plate to the side and she felt it meant that the visit was something of a chore for him, one that could now be concluded without loss of politeness.

She walked out of the apartment minutes later, walked to the corner, and turned left. She was walking toward a vendor’s stand where she had seen, the day before, a print she liked: of a field, an open road, and an old-looking horse, in repose. It was a generic print, but she liked the horse, which looked pathetic
and unfriendly. The stand was there, and there was a small crowd browsing or waiting to pay. Several Spaniards were involved in a conversation with the seller. She found and took hold of the print. On the last occasion she saw Arthur he told her that if she ever wanted to return to Barcelona, he’d be happy to let her stay in the flat. At the end of summer for instance – she could return at the end of summer and stay as long as she liked. As a young man he had found that it benefited him greatly to experience new surroundings, he said; he’d spent a transformative three months on Greece’s Saronic islands. She pictured herself walking down this street alone, reaching the street of their flat, past the fountain and up the stairs into a quiet apartment, empty, entirely hers.

The seller was still in conversation and she turned toward the street. Walking not far from her on the sidewalk was a pair of young men; one of them was twirling something like a short thick cable. She would have turned away, but the man then suddenly ran up, quickly, and smacked the cable – it was hard to tell what exactly it was – loudly across the bare thighs of a woman standing near Amanda and among the other tourists. Up close Amanda saw that he was not a man but a teenager. He ran away swiftly to where his friend was and then continued walking at a lively pace, turning back to look toward the woman and laughing. The expression on the woman’s face was one of white shock and shame, and pain. The man next to the woman, who was with her, stared after the young laughing boys with an expression of mouth and brow that he might have worn while watching news of violence in other parts of the world, a baffled and concerned expression. Amanda looked away from the woman, to overcome the shame she shared with
her. She saw that the woman wanted to rub the place she had been hit, but her hand merely hovered near it. No one else seemed to have seen, or comprehended, what had happened. Amanda shook her head, and said, “They are awful,” though she did not know what language the woman spoke; nor was the woman looking at her. After a pause, Amanda put the print back, realizing she could not, anyway, bear to draw attention to herself and ask the vendor if he spoke English.
Nasty
, she thought, and stopped on her walk home to take the notebook out of her purse and write it down. At the flat she complained to Earl of a stomachache, and wrapped herself in the quilt on the bed. He brought her tea, a book, and she let him move the strand of hair falling across her eye, and she let him lie next to her, and she did not go out for the rest of the day.

Millie sits at her vanity and thinks about Amanda wanting to go to Barcelona to learn Spanish. When Millie first asked why Amanda would not choose to learn, for example, French instead, Amanda said she had just liked Barcelona so much. This was not one of the things Millie remembered about Barcelona, Amanda liking it so much. To Millie, Barcelona was all hot, sticky air, lush foliage, and corrugated metal shop doors that were pulled down at closing time. But what she remembers about Barcelona most clearly, somehow, is the baggy dress and funny little slippers Amanda wore day after day. It was a short, wide dress, with a deep front, and when they sat down in cafés, the waiters – men, almost all – could see much of her bra.

“It’s summer,” Amanda would say, inexplicably, when Millie said the dress doesn’t fit well. It was warm, yes; in fact it was
hot and oppressive and full of people. The dress became a joke. Millie remembers the south-facing apartment and that in the morning they took their coffee on the little canopied balcony. She remembers the bus stop just down the block, and that they would watch people waiting for the bus: youngsters and ladies going for groceries. The bus came every twenty minutes, they had figured out; she thinks now that they never saw anyone run for it. There was an urban sleepiness to everything in that neighbourhood, not stillness, but an unhurriedness to the rhythms of life, the closing of doors, the gentle way the cars pulled away from the curbs. Sometimes Amanda slept in and Earl and Millie and Grace had breakfast without her under the canopy. “Let’s leave her for the day,” Earl would joke with Millie and Grace, to lighten things. Then, as Millie rinsed plates, she would hear a plaintive voice behind not-quite closed doors, Earl’s voice, gently coaxing Amanda out.

Through her window Millie can see Earl pruning a bush. He’s not protesting Amanda going to Barcelona, as far as Millie can tell. Would she know if he did protest? She doesn’t know if she would know. Earl may not be what she had once, long ago, pictured for her daughter: before he appeared, she had imagined Amanda with many types of men – tall and gallant and intellectual, kind and self-effacing and brilliant. What she got was Earl, his friendly-neighbour manner, a provincial familiarity, advanced age, and few credentials. But she now certainly doesn’t want to picture anyone else in his place. She has tried to help them where she could. She gave up the house to him and Amanda – she really only needed one room, two at the most – and a few years ago cashed in some bonds to pay for Earl’s two-year diploma. But how are things between them
now – she would give up many things to know. Amanda doesn’t talk to her anymore, and Earl, of course, won’t suddenly start. This tells Millie what she dreads, that things are getting worse. Millie remembers the old man they rented the apartment from in Barcelona, and his son and the housekeeper, the son’s wife. It was months before the trip that Amanda’s oddness began, and when they were in Barcelona, Grace said it was great to see Amanda engaging with people. She was right – the thing Millie had dreaded about the trip was that she would have to implore Amanda to leave her room at all. It had turned out that she didn’t have to do that, most days.

One afternoon, standing by a fountain on the corner of their street, she saw Amanda leaving a café with Jude, not Arthur, walking with her hands in the pockets of her funny dress. She didn’t tell Earl what she saw. Amanda came home within the hour, and Millie would surely have cut off her own ear to have Amanda lean into her on the terrace and tell her what she and Jude talked about. Why does a depressed girl have enough energy to talk to strangers and not to her own family? She was encouraged by seeing Amanda choose restaurants and discuss literature, but why should it have been strangers who got the pleasure of the real Amanda, the one Millie has been waiting to wake up to one morning? Millie wanted to help Earl, if only she could. In their bedroom are pictures of Amanda and of the two of them together – Amanda with her mouth full of Timbits and her eyes open wide, Amanda dressed like a 1920s flapper posing for the shot with a gloved arm holding a cigarette in a cigarette holder, Amanda and Earl on a bridge in Banff, night-time and the reflection of lamps in the river behind them, embracing tightly.

Millie looks out again and sees Earl still pruning. She drops her hairbrush, walks out of the room, through the kitchen, out the front door, and into the yard towards him. She sees him notice her and smile. She walks right up, holding up her hand as a shield from the sun, and asks him if he needs a drink – nope.

“It’s starting to look good,” she says.

“Be ready in a few more days.”

“It’ll be strange without Grace around,” she says, “won’t it?”

“I’ll miss that old broad.”

“Oh, Earl. It will be strange without her. A little bit empty.”

“She’ll be over lots, I’m sure. If Larry goes away on some contract, she might come and stay here, hang out with you and Amanda.”

Here Millie brightens a little.

“She’s always welcome, of course. What’s Mandy doing?” Millie was in the habit of asking Earl about Amanda as if they didn’t all live in the same house.

“Oh, chatting on the phone or something.”

This can’t be true because Amanda never talks on the phone.

“Oh. Do you think she’s serious about this Barcelona thing? The language course thing?”

“Seems like it. Might be good for her. You know there’s work in languages – translating, interpreting, things like that.”

It irritates Millie when Earl says far-fetched things that sidetrack her from what she is obliquely trying to say. As if Amanda is going to go to Barcelona to begin a career in interpreting for the United Nations.

“Right. I was thinking I’d feel better about the whole thing if you were going with her.”

“Yes?”

“It’s only that she doesn’t know anyone there. She hasn’t asked you to go with her?” He pauses, making Millie fear that she’s been far too direct. Earl is capable, she knows, of shutting down conversation, her conversation about Amanda specifically, quite politely and unmistakably.