We So Seldom Look on Love (22 page)

“I know, I know,” he says. “I just love you so much. And I thought—” He taps his nails on the arm of the chair.

“Thought what?”

“I thought it would all be over by now.”

“What do you mean?”

“The surgery.”

The construction of a penis, the last in a series of operations.

“You mean you were never going to tell me?” she asks, twisting around to look at him.

“Of course I was.” He taps his nails. “You’d see the scars,” he adds.

“Who else knows?”

He looks surprised. “Nobody. Well, the doctors.”

“Does Bernie know?”

He shakes his head.

“Are your parents really dead?”

“They’re dead,” he says softly.

“You could have lied about everything,” she says.

He looks straight at her. “Presenting myself as a guy might seem like a lie to you. But to me I
am
a guy. In every way except one, and that’s going to change.”

“Oh, Lord.”

“Look, I knew you’d be shocked,” he says. “I expected there’d be a big blow-up. But we love each other, right? I mean, I love you, I know that. And …” He blinks and looks down. “I can still give you pleasure.”

She buries her face in the pillow. The hand that knew exactly what to do was a woman’s hand. “Let’s wait until we’re married,” he said every time her hand drifted down his body, down to what she flattered herself was an erection.

She starts crying again. “I thought it was something spiritual in you,” she says. “A vow to be pure or something.”

He taps one nail, a steady, agitating sound, like a dripping tap.

“I feel so stupid,” she says.

“I’ll never hit you,” he says quietly. “I’ll never shout at you. I’ll always love you. I’ll always listen to you. I’ll never leave you. I’ll never fool around on you.”

She has to laugh. “One thing for sure,” she says, “you’ll never get Cory Bates pregnant.”

She began to see John Bucci two or three afternoons a week plus Tuesday nights, when her father was at the Legion Hall. Because John lived with his aunt they couldn’t make love at his house, so they did it in his car. John wanted to marry her, or at least to see her more often, at nights especially, but he didn’t push her, not at first.

“I admire you for putting your father’s feelings above your own,” he said.

Which made her feel dishonest. All she was doing, really, was trying to keep everything on an even keel. Over the summer she had stopped sticking so faithfully to her mother’s routine, but she was still the woman of the house, and having a boyfriend felt like having an affair. “Maybe you can come for a visit in a couple of months,” she told John, thinking that by then her mother would have been gone a year.

His family she had met many times—his aunt, his two sisters, his four nieces and three nephews, his brothers-in-law—because on Tuesday evenings, after they’d made love, he took her to his place for something to eat, and there was always a gang in the kitchen. The sisters raved about her the way he did. They told her she had the skin of a baby, and they said they hoped her and John’s children came out with her blue eyes and dimples. They just assumed that she and John would get married and build a house on their aunt’s property, as they themselves had done. They urged her to make John hire somebody named Marcel to dig the foundation. They affectionately counselled her to hit John if he didn’t get the ball rolling. “Hit him with a stick!” they cried. “Hit him you know where!” With them she talked about her mother, since they talked so readily about their own. She knew from John that their mother had died in a car accident, but they told her how she had flown through the windshield and how in the casket her face looked
like Dracula’s, it was so stitched up. They cried, and she cried. “You are our sister,” they said, which more than anything John said, or did, had her dreaming of marriage.

The aunt that John lived with, Aunt Lucia, wasn’t so friendly. She couldn’t speak English, for one thing. She glared from the stove and pointed at the chair that Marion was to sit in. She furiously circled her fist in front of her mouth if Marion ate too slowly. As Marion was on her way out the door Aunt Lucia usually thrust a jar of something at her—relish, spaghetti sauce—as if challenging her to take it, as if she knew that Marion would lie to her father about where it had come from.

“From Cory’s mother,” was what Marion told him. Her father had never met Mr. or Mrs. Bates and he probably never would, given their waking hours, so it was a safe white lie. Marion had phoned them three or four times to find out about Cory, but there was never any answer. She had finally gone to the apartment and rung the bell and knocked on the door. Still no answer.

“They’re there, all right,” said Mrs. Hodgson, the old lady who managed the pet store downstairs. “Every once in a while you hear a thump.” She said that Cory left one morning on the Greyhound bus for Toronto. “Gussied up like a prostitute,” she said without malice. “You know the way she does.”

“What happened to that puppy?” Marion asked. “The German shepherd?”

“Oh, it died,” Mrs. Hodgson said. “When I wasn’t looking somebody threw in a dog biscuit laced with, oh, whatchamacallit, oh—” She snapped her fingers. “Arsenic.”

“But that’s terrible,” Marion said.

“Yes,” Mrs. Hodgson said vaguely.

“Did they ever catch the person?” Marion asked.

Mrs. Hodgson shifted on her stool. “Shut your yakking!” she shouted at the parrot in the cage behind her. She turned back. “Poison’s an awful way to die,” she said. “Contortions and
foaming at the mouth. But falling from a great height, that’s what I’d hate the most. Knowing in seconds you were going to splat. I heard of this man, he was like a mad scientist. He threw live animals from apartment balconies to see how they landed. Naturally, the cats tended to land on their feet, even if they died. But I’ll tell you the interesting part. The higher the cats fell from, the better chance they had of living. Because a cat has to straighten itself out in the air, and that takes time.”

A couple of weeks later Marion was driving by the pet store and saw a Help Wanted sign in the window. On a whim she went inside and asked about it. It was part-time, Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, and seeing as she never saw John before lunch anyway, she decided to take it. She was prepared to be alone in the store (Mrs. Hodgson’s plan was to do bookkeeping and chores at home), but more often than not, Mrs. Hodgson was sitting on the stool when Marion arrived, and she didn’t budge until Marion left. While Marion cleaned cages and fed the fish and birds and played with the puppies, Mrs. Hodgson handled the cash and told Marion—and any customer who happened to be listening—her ghoulish stories. Most of them she read about in
Coroner’s Report,
a magazine that her dead photographer husband had taken pictures for and that she still subscribed to, but she also had plenty of her own stories, many of which concerned animals. Cats put in ovens, dryers and dishwashers. Hamsters sucked up vacuums. A dog tied to the back of a car and forced to run to death.

One day, after describing the murder-suicide of a husband and wife, she said, “You probably know about that teacher out at Marley Road School, the one that was carrying on with the janitor and he killed her?” Then, before Marion could speak, she said, “What slays me is his name was something-or-other Killer. Bart or Tom Killer. Anyways, her husband was starting to get suspicious, so she decided to call it quits. Which sent Mr. Killer off the deep end. He stabs her forty-seven times I think
the number was. Then he drives out to the cemetery on Highway 10, sits himself down on his own mother’s grave, and shoots himself between the eyes.”

“Good heavens,” Marion said.

“For a janitor he sure made an awful mess,” Mrs. Hodgson said.

What struck Marion was Mrs. Hodgson having no idea that she was Ellen Judd’s daughter. She’d thought that everybody in Garvey either made the connection right away or was told about it soon enough. So that was a surprise, Mrs. Hodgson having no idea. As for her mother and Bert Kella being lovers, people had hinted along those lines before, but no one even slightly acquainted with her mother, or with Bert Kella for that matter, believed it for a second.

Marion decided not to straighten Mrs. Hodgson out. Somebody else would, sooner or later, although that’s not why she didn’t say anything. And it wasn’t because she was too upset or too disheartened, either. Actually—and this was new for her—she felt disdain. “Stabs her forty-seven times,” Mrs. Hodgson said, getting that essential fact so completely and elaborately wrong, and Marion thought, “Nobody knows.” It was a thrilling, lonely revelation.

Eventually they fall asleep, Marion in the bed, and Sam sitting in the chair. Near dawn, screeching tires wake them both up.

Sam runs a hand over his face. “There’s no sense in staying here,” he says.

Marion looks at him. His blue shirt holds its colour in the gloom. He has wide shoulders. You could draw his silhouette and pass it around and everyone would swear it was a man. Last night she believed she had no choice except to divorce him. Now she’s not sure she even has what it takes to send back all the gifts, let alone to come up with an explanation for the
marriage ending on the honeymoon. “I guess we should just go home,” she says, swinging her legs onto the floor.

“Okay,” he says carefully.

“Glenda will think we don’t trust her with the dogs,” she says. Glenda is the retarded girl who works for her part-time.

“She’ll be right,” Sam says, laughing.

“Nothing is settled,” she says sharply.

He gets up and goes into the bathroom. He’s in there a long time with the taps running. She feeds the kitten. When he comes out, she and the kitten go right in. She manages to coax the kitten into peeing, then she sits on the toilet and flushes to veil the sound. Sam calls out that he’s going to the office to pay the bill, so she decides to have a quick shower. Seeing her breasts in the mirror makes her cry. Everything about her from the neck down seems a waste now, and perverse, as if
she’s
the one with the wrong body.

By the time he returns she is dressed and is packing the few things they unpacked. He says he thinks he’ll have a shower, too. She sits on a lawn chair outside their door and eats wedding cake until the thought of him washing his female genitals crosses her mind, and she has to spit out what’s in her mouth. A few minutes later he steps in it, coming out with the suitcases. “All set?” he asks.

In the car, neither of them say a word. At one point he clears his throat, making what strikes her as a prissy sound, and for the first time since he told her she has the horrifying thought that people might be suspicious. She remembers Grace saying, “Does he ever have long eyelashes!” She looks over at him and he’s blinking hard. It means he’s nervous, but she used to think he had a tic.

Her eyes fill. The “him” that she used to love isn’t there any more. It never was there, that’s the staggering part. And yet she still loves him. She wonders if she’s subconsciously bisexual. Or maybe it’s true that she loves blindly. When she kept
protesting that she loved John Bucci—years after the divorce—her friend Emma, who was always trying to fix her up with a date, told her about an experiment in which a newborn chimp was put into a cage with a felt-covered, formula-dispensing coat hanger, and the chimp became so attached to this lactating contraption that when its real mother was finally allowed into the cage, it wouldn’t go near her.

On Valentine’s Day, John Bucci gave her chocolates in a black velvet case as big as a pizza box. Also a gigantic card with a photograph of a grandfather clock and the message “Time Will Never Change Our Love.” She dropped the chocolates off at the pet store for Mrs. Hodgson to offer to customers. The card she took home in a shopping bag and hid in her underwear drawer. The next night, during supper, her father asked if she was seeing the Italian fellow who sold shoes at the mall, and her first stunning thought was that he had gone through her drawers, but it turned out that Mr. Grit had spotted her in John’s car.

“Oh, well, I have lunch with him sometimes,” she said, which was true. “He’s a friend of Cory’s,” she added, which was also true, or had been.

“He sold me those maroon loafers,” her father said. “Must have been three years ago now. Crackerjack salesman, I’ll hand him that.”

She didn’t know what to say.

“Doesn’t he have something to do with that Esso station out on Highway 10?” her father asked. “I saw him on the phone once. In the office.”

“I think he’s a partner or something,” Marion said.

Her father pushed his plate away and took a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. When his head was shaking as much as it was tonight, he didn’t light his cigarettes in his mouth. He held the match under the end until the paper and tobacco caught on
their own. “Used to be a Shell station,” he said, putting the cigarette between his lips and taking a deep drag.

“Oh, that’s right,” she said.

“Jack Kreutziger owned it,” he said.

She nodded.

“Before that,” he said, “there were the Diehls. Then before that, now this is going back, it was a restaurant. I remember you could buy two thick slices of roast beef, a mountain of mashed potatoes and a side order of fresh peas for a dollar forty-nine.”

“A dollar forty-nine,” she marvelled.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

She could have told him everything—this burst of conversation was him putting out the welcome mat, doing his best to be both mother and father to her. Instead she stood up and began clearing the table. It wasn’t that she thought he’d be mad or even particularly worried about her, that had never been the issue. Her mother might have had something to say about an Italian Catholic who drove a red convertible and wore gold jewellery, but all Marion could imagine her father saying was, “You should bring him around for supper.”

Still, she didn’t tell him, and although she was touched by what he was trying to do, and she was afraid he’d go away thinking he couldn’t get through to her, it was John she felt guilty about. Ever since Christmas, John had been badgering her to give him an exact date when she intended to introduce him to her father. “Not until the end of February,” was what she said at first, February second being the day her mother died. Now that it was almost the middle of February, she was thinking she’d better wait until after her brother’s wedding in April.