When I Was Young and In My Prime (8 page)

“Nietzsche didn't have any particular problem with Jesus,” he said.“It was Christians he couldn't stand.”

On our second date we went to an anti-NAFTA protest. I remember someone was carrying a huge banner that said, DOWN WITH THE CONTENTED.

He quoted Whitman to me:
Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.
I quoted back:
As the child sees the world the world is.
We knew everything.

Who can ever say exactly what makes us open to another person? Chance, uncanny passwords. I remember a cartoon torn from a newspaper. He'd tacked it to the ulcerous, uncleanable, paint-flaking, layer-a-tenant wall beside his bathroom mirror. It was an image of people mingling at a cocktail party. A huge thought bubble hovered over the crowd, fed by little tributaries of bubbles from each person's head. Inside the bubble, this thought:
Everyone's having a good time but me.
It made me trust him.

Squalls of irritation: sitting at the kitchen table together, him reading the paper, me making notes on a book for a course I'm taking and my pen is running out of ink and he's chewing his yogurt (who the hell
chews
yogurt?) and it's all I can do to keep from stuffing my pen up his nose.

Moments of intense seeing: watching him swim alone in an Algonquin Park lake one autumn afternoon, something about the sight of him treading water way out—his back to me, the sky darkening above—makes me want nothing more than to love him well.

“Can there be any love without pity?” A couple of years ago I came across this line in a novel and, even though it was a question rather than a statement, I remember feeling absolved by it somehow. Absolved of a crime I hadn't quite known I suspected myself of having committed.

His father was a violent man, and this means that James is awkwardly tender, a tinman afraid he didn't inherit a heart. There's an ache in his eyes that makes them look constantly astonished. When we met, I quickly became addicted to giving him a new reason for that astonishment. It was like facing a man who's falling backward; if you catch his outstretched hands and immediately fall backward with all your weight, both of your falls are transformed into the first gesture of a dance.

We were introduced by friends one night and within five days we'd pooled all our money. We moved in together within three weeks. We gave the biggest coin we had between us to every beggar and busker we passed. We married—just the two of us at city hall—within the year. I was nineteen and he was twenty-four.

“Babies!” his landlady snorted derisively. “I wasn't smart enough to choose my own underwear when I was nineteen.” But she gave us a wedding present anyway: an “Instant Romance” kit from Zellers, which consisted of a bottle of sparkling wine, a pair of fake crystal champagne flutes and a matching candle holder. We drank it on the roof of the building, spreading a blanket over the pigeon shit so we could lie down and look at the stars.

Married at nineteen in this day and age. I thought I'd found a shortcut. To what though? I didn't have a clear idea, but intuited a strenuousness, a muscularity, both noble and animal, in the notion of mating for life.

Or maybe it was just a kind of RRSP of the heart.

Sometimes he sets her up to do the dishes when he needs a break. That works for a while, but then it gets to the point where she's just washing the same plate over and over and over and over until he simply can't stand it any longer.
 

I was there last week when it happened. Grandpa got up, snatched the plate from her, dashed it to the floor and sat down again, all in one motion.

I held my breath, eyes on a triangle of china near my foot. It was from the edge of the plate. Gold trim. Apple blossom pattern. The good china on the farm, demoted to everyday china when they got the Denby pattern after they moved to town.
 

My breath ran out. He let go his fist, pushed his chair back and walked unsteadily to the side door. Didn't look at either of us, let the screen door slam behind him.

I was free to look at her then. Her lips were twitching slightly, as if searching for their rightful shape. After a while they settled in an apologetic smile, and she tugged her eyes from the window, rested them on me. All I could think to do was the other thing that Grandpa always does lately when he needs a rest from her. I steered her around the broken plate, out of the kitchen, into the front room. Guided her down onto the piano stool. Opened the songbook. “Tie a Yellow Ribbon.”
 

Standing behind her, I placed her hands on the keys, pulled the chain on the lamp and set the metronome swinging.
 

She looked back at me; I nodded.
 

She looked at the music.
 

She pressed the first chord: dissonance.
 

She tried again: again, a random, jarring blare. She looked back at me.
 

“It's okay,” I said, trying to make my smile mild—a balm, a sling. I pointed my eyes to the keys. “Try again.”
 

So she played.
 

Had she missed the flats? She didn't stop. Was she playing in the wrong key? She didn't stop. Had she started with her hands in the wrong position?
 

The roof was falling in. She didn't stop.
 

When she came to the end of the music her hands slipped off the keys into her lap, but she kept her foot on the pedal, letting the room steep briefly in the sound of the wrong notes, sustained.

First time I saw my own bone was when we had the farm. Mary had coaxed me into clearing the irrigation pond to make a rink. Wanted to have her class out for a Christmas skating party. I did, and it was a hit alright. The kids were pretty wound up, and near dark one of the boys thought he was being smart and tripped me with his hockey stick as I was skating by. Well I went flying, and when I hit the ice my forearm snapped—you could hear the sound of it clear as anything in the cold air, just like kindling snapped over your knee. Shot clear through the skin. Well I taught that lad a lesson he'd never forget. I got myself seated in the snowbank and then told him to hold his stick out crosswise. I put my loose hand on the stick, put my good hand over it and yelled at him,
Pull goddammit!
And by golly he pulled. His face like a popsicle with all the colour sucked from it. Together we got that bone back in place until I could get myself to a doctor.
 

I'll never forget that, the sight of my own bone in the open air. The thought of it could get to you, if you let it.

Monday morning. I walk to work. I've taken a day shift at the bar as a favour to someone who recently did me a favour (in this way the economy of the bar keeps going—we all drink there and overtip each other, a potlatch battle to be the one to buy the drinks).
 

I hate day shifts. It's quiet and relaxed and you make decent money 'cause there's no one to tip out and the weekday afternoon drinkers all tip well (that nucleus of regulars who all make their livings in canny, shifty ways—musicians, bouncers and landlords on disability, a comedian, a chef, guys who maybe gamble or deal a little on the side), but it's depressing. I hate having to watch how the first shot-and-beer-chaser of the day steadies the hands of certain paper-reading regulars.

A woman stands on the corner of King and Dowling. She's wearing a loose Simpsons t-shirt, bicycle shorts and black pumps with a low heel, almost demure. Nothing exactly advertising sex, except maybe the shoes, but her hip is cocked into the street with such hook, such unmasked intention, that there's no room to think she might just be waiting for a cab or a streetcar. Passing her, giving her a wide berth so as not to disturb the charged ring she's conjuring around herself, I see for a second how hard the work is. Pouring oneself out into bottomless streets.

Liza can't remember where her washcloths are kept or how the aloe plant got into the basket of her walker, but she teases me so skillfully as I wash her back that I can imagine just how she flirted with her now-dead husband the year they were both working at a summer camp and fell for each other. She was in the kitchen, he was the maintenance man. She was almost thirty then, and I imagine she'd given up on all that, considered herself an old maid. I imagine he woke a dormant rascal in her. I imagine their romance involved threading worms onto hooks and sunlight and swimming.
 

The other day Liza was late for dinner because she got halfway to the dining hall and realized she was barefoot, had to shuffle back to her room for her shoes and socks.
 

Her feet are ticklish. They jump as I wash them.
 

Last night she told me a joke as I helped her off with her clothes—a joke about a truck driver picking up a hitch-hiking little girl and asking her to take off her pants and the girl giggling 'cause there was no way her pants would fit that man. Liza laughed then sobered. “It's not fair,” she said to me, “you all dressed and me naked.”
 

She said it so plainly that for a moment, I had a genuine impulse to take off my clothes.