The Love of a Good Woman (15 page)

“Well to be frank,” he said. “It doesn’t sound like such a sensible thing to do, to be frank about it.”

“A wild-goose chase,” said Sonje cheerfully.

“There’s a probability he might be dead now anyway.”

“True.”

“And he could have gone anywhere and lived anywhere. That is if your theory is correct.”

“True.”

“So the only hope is if he really died then and your theory isn’t correct, then you might find out about it and you wouldn’t be any further ahead than you are now anyway.”

“Oh, I think I would.”

“You could do just as well then to stay here and write some letters.”

Sonje said she disagreed. She said you couldn’t go through official channels regarding this sort of thing.

“You have to make yourself known in the streets.”

In the streets of Jakarta—that was where she meant to start. In places like Jakarta people don’t shut themselves up. People live in the streets and things are known about them. Shopkeepers know, there’s always somebody who knows somebody else and so forth. She would ask questions and word would get around that she was there. A man like Cottar could not have just slipped by. Even after all this time there’d be some memory. Information of one sort or another. Some of it expensive, not all of it truthful. Nevertheless.

Kent thought of asking her what she planned to use for money. Could she have inherited something from her parents? He seemed to remember that they’d cut her off at the time of her marriage. Perhaps she thought she could get a fat price for this property. A long shot, but maybe she was right.

Even so, she could fling it all away in a couple of months. Word would get around that she was there, all right.

“Those cities have changed a lot” was all he said.

“Not that I’d neglect the usual channels,” she said. “I’d go after everybody I could. The embassy, the burial records, the medical registry if there is such a thing. In fact I’ve written letters already. But all you get is the runaround. You have to confront them in the flesh. You have to be there. Be there. Keep coming around and making a nuisance of yourself and finding out where their soft
spots are and be prepared to pass something under the table if you have to. I don’t have any illusions about its being easy.

“For instance I expect there’ll be devastating heat. It doesn’t sound as if it has a good location at all—Jakarta. There are swamps and lowlands all around. I’m not stupid. I’ll get my shots and take all the precautions. I’ll take my vitamins, and Jakarta being started by the Dutch there shouldn’t be any shortage of gin. The Dutch East Indies. It’s not a very old city, you know. It was built I think sometime in the 1600s. Just a minute. I have all sorts of—I’ll show you—I have—”

She set down her glass which had been empty for some time, got up quickly, and after a couple of steps caught her foot in the torn sisal and lurched forward, but steadied herself by holding on to the door frame and didn’t fall. “Got to get rid of this old matting,” she said, and hurried into the house.

He heard a struggle with stiff drawers, then a sound as of a pile of papers falling, and all through this she kept talking to him, in that half-frantic reassuring way of people desperate not to lose your attention. He could not make out what she was saying, or didn’t try to. He was taking the opportunity to swallow a pill—something he’d been thinking about doing for the last half hour. It was a small pill that didn’t require him to take a drink—his glass was empty too—and he could probably have got it to his mouth without Sonje’s noticing what he was doing. But something like shyness or superstition prevented him from trying. He did not mind Deborah’s constant awareness of his condition, and his children of course had to know, but there seemed to be some sort of ban against revealing it to his contemporaries.

The pill was just in time. A tide of faintness, unfriendly heat, threatened disintegration, came crawling upwards and broke out in sweat drops on his temples. For a few minutes he felt this presence making headway, but by a controlled calm breathing and a
casual rearrangement of his limbs he held his own against it. During this time Sonje reappeared with a batch of papers—maps and printed sheets that she must have copied from library books. Some of them slipped from her hands as she sat down. They lay scattered around on the sisal.

“Now, what they call old Batavia,” she said. “That’s very geometrically laid out. Very Dutch. There’s a suburb called Weltevreden. It means ‘well contented.’ So wouldn’t it be a joke if I found him living there? There’s the Old Portuguese Church. Built in the late 1600s. It’s a Muslim country of course. They have the biggest mosque there in Southeast Asia. Captain Cook put in to have his ships repaired, he was very complimentary about the shipyards. But he said the ditches out in the bogs were foul. They probably still are. Cottar never looked very strong, but he took better care of himself than you’d think. He wouldn’t just go wandering round malarial bogs or buying drinks from a street vendor. Well of course now, if he’s there, I expect he’ll be completely acclimatized. I don’t know what to expect. I can see him gone completely native or I can see him nicely set up with his little brown woman waiting on him. Eating fruit beside a pool. Or he could be going around begging for the poor.”

As a matter of fact there was one thing Kent remembered. The night of the party on the beach, Cottar wearing nothing but an insufficient towel had come up to him and asked him what he knew, as a pharmacist, about tropical diseases.

But that had not seemed out of line. Anybody going where he was going might have done the same.

“You’re thinking of India,” he said to Sonje.

He was stabilized now, the pill giving him back some reliability of his inner workings, halting what had felt like the runoff of bone marrow.

“You know one reason I know he’s not dead?” said Sonje. “I
don’t dream about him. I dream about dead people. I dream all the time about my mother-in-law.”

“I don’t dream,” Kent said.

“Everybody dreams,” said Sonje. “You just don’t remember.”

He shook his head.

Kath was not dead. She lived in Ontario. In the Haliburton district, not so far from Toronto.

“Does your mother know I’m here?” he’d said to Noelle. And she’d said, “Oh, I think so. Sure.”

But there came no knock on the door. When Deborah asked him if he wanted to make a detour he had said, “Let’s not go out of our way. It wouldn’t be worth it.”

Kath lived alone beside a small lake. The man she had lived with for a long time, and built the house with, was dead. But she had friends, said Noelle, she was all right.

When Sonje had mentioned Kath’s name, earlier in the conversation, he had the warm and dangerous sense of these two women still being in touch with each other. There was the risk then of hearing something he didn’t want to know but also the silly hope that Sonje might report to Kath how well he was looking (and he was, he believed so, with his weight fairly steady and the tan he’d picked up in the Southwest) and how satisfactorily he was married. Noelle might have said something of the kind, but somehow Sonje’s word would count for more than Noelle’s. He waited for Sonje to speak of Kath again.

But Sonje had not taken that tack. Instead it was all Cottar, and stupidity, and Jakarta.

T
HE
disturbance was outside now—not in him but outside the windows, where the wind that had been stirring the bushes, all this time, had risen to push hard at them. And these were not the sort
of bushes that stream their long loose branches before such a wind. Their branches were tough and their leaves had enough weight so that each bush had to be rocked from its roots. Sunlight flashed off the oily greens. For the sun still shone, no clouds had arrived with the wind, it didn’t mean rain.

“Another drink?” said Sonje. “Easier on the gin?”

No. After the pill, he couldn’t.

Everything was in a hurry. Except when everything was desperately slow. When they drove, he waited and waited, just for Deborah to get to the next town. And then what? Nothing. But once in a while came a moment when everything seemed to have something to say to you. The rocking bushes, the bleaching light. All in a flash, in a rush, when you couldn’t concentrate. Just when you wanted summing up, you got a speedy, goofy view, as from a fun-ride. So you picked up the wrong idea, surely the wrong idea. That somebody dead might be alive and in Jakarta.

But when you knew somebody was alive, when you could drive to the very door, you let the opportunity pass.

What wouldn’t be worth it? To see her a stranger that he couldn’t believe he’d ever been married to, or to see that she could never be a stranger yet was unaccountably removed?

“They got away,” he said. “Both of them.”

Sonje let the papers on her lap slide to the floor to lie with the others.

“Cottar and Kath,” he said.

“This happens almost every day,” she said. “Almost every day this time of year, this wind in the late afternoon.”

The coin spots on her face picked up the light as she talked, like signals from a mirror.

“Your wife’s been gone a long time,” she said. “It’s absurd, but young people seem unimportant to me. As if they could vanish off the earth and it wouldn’t really matter.”

“Just the opposite,” Kent said. “That’s us you’re talking about. That’s us.”

Because of the pill his thoughts stretch out long and gauzy and lit up like vapor trails. He travels a thought that has to do with staying here, with listening to Sonje talk about Jakarta while the wind blows sand off the dunes.

A thought that has to do with not having to go on, to go home.

L
ITTLE
bride. I was twenty years old, five feet seven inches tall, weighing between a hundred and thirty-five and a hundred and forty pounds, but some people—Chess’s boss’s wife, and the older secretary in his office, and Mrs. Gorrie upstairs, referred to me as a little bride. Our little bride, sometimes. Chess and I made a joke of it, but his public reaction was a look fond and cherishing. Mine was a pouty smile—bashful, acquiescent.

We lived in a basement in Vancouver. The house did not belong to the Gorries, as I had at first thought, but to Mrs. Gorrie’s son Ray. He would come around to fix things. He entered by the basement door, as Chess and I did. He was a thin, narrow-chested man, perhaps in his thirties, always carrying a toolbox and wearing a workman’s cap. He seemed to have a permanent stoop, which might have come from bending over most of the time, attending to plumbing jobs or wiring or carpentry. His face was waxy, and he coughed a good deal. Each cough was a discreet independent statement, defining his presence in the basement as a necessary
intrusion. He did not apologize for being there, but he did not move around in the place as if he owned it. The only times I spoke to him were when he knocked on the door to tell me that the water was going to be turned off for a little while, or the power. The rent was paid in cash every month to Mrs. Gorrie. I don’t know if she passed it all on to him or kept some of it out to help with expenses. Otherwise all she and Mr. Gorrie had—she told me so—was Mr. Gorrie’s pension. Not hers. I’m not nearly old enough, she said.

Mrs. Gorrie always called down the stairs to ask how Ray was and whether he would like a cup of tea. He always said he was okay and he didn’t have time. She said that he worked too hard, just like herself. She tried to fob off on him some extra dessert she had made, some preserves or cookies or gingerbread—the same things she was always pushing at me. He would say no, he had just eaten, or that he had plenty of stuff at home. I always resisted, too, but on the seventh or eighth try I would give in. It was so embarrassing to go on refusing, in the face of her wheedling and disappointment. I admired the way Ray could keep saying no. He didn’t even say, “No, Mother.” Just no.

Then she tried to find some topic of conversation.

“So what’s new and exciting with you?”

Not much. Don’t know. Ray was never rude or irritable, but he never gave her an inch. His health was okay. His cold was okay. Mrs. Cornish and Irene were always okay as well.

Mrs. Cornish was a woman whose house he lived in, somewhere in East Vancouver. He always had jobs to do around Mrs. Cornish’s house as well as around this one—that was why he had to hurry away as soon as the work was done. He also helped with the care of her daughter Irene, who was in a wheelchair. Irene had cerebral palsy. “The poor thing,” Mrs. Gorrie said, after Ray told her that Irene was okay. She never reproached him to his face for the time he spent with the afflicted girl, the outings to Stanley Park
or the evening jaunts to get ice cream. (She knew about these things because she sometimes talked on the phone to Mrs. Cornish.) But to me she said, “I can’t help thinking what a sight she must be with the ice cream running down her face. I can’t help it. People must have a good time gawking at them.”

She said that when she took Mr. Gorrie out in his wheelchair people looked at them (Mr. Gorrie had had a stroke), but it was different, because outside the house he didn’t move or make a sound and she always made sure he was presentable. Whereas Irene lolled around and went
gaggledy-gaggledy-gaggledy.
The poor thing couldn’t help it.