Where She Has Gone (12 page)

For a moment, face to face like that, all our defences seemed down.

“Yeah. I dunno. I’ve been sick.”

“I tried to call,” she said.

“Oh.”

We stood not looking at each other. What the matter came down to was this: we were the same, were both frightened and ashamed, were both alone.

There was a sound of movement in the background. Rita’s eyes met mine for an instant like a curtain rising and falling.

“John’s here,” she said.

He was in the kitchen, sitting with his awkward bulk in one of the rickety vinyl chairs there. He smiled his pained smile when I came in and rose to shake my hand. The smile gave him the look of someone who’d borne all his life some small, unremitting affliction.

“So we meet so soon again after all,” he said. “I hope you’re better now.”

He was a bit formal and stiff, uneasy perhaps at being
found here or simply sensing, if only from the look of me, the charged atmosphere that my arrival had ushered in.

“Yes. Better. Thanks.”

There was a moment’s strained silence. Something in the chemistry of the three of us alone in Rita’s kitchen seemed to have set up a hum of weird, not-quite-readable tensions.

“Please, sit down,” John said.

We sat. Rita had already melted into the background, collecting a few dirty dishes off the table and then turning her back to us and busying herself at the kitchen counter. All of this seemed to have come about as if by arrangement, John and I at the table, Rita safely away. I had a flash again of the fevered paranoia of the past few days.

“So you must be busy now with the end of term,” John said.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

“Ah.”

There was a sort of stumbling forward into conversation. Rita was making coffee, using the conversation like a shield. Every time there was a lapse, her movements would quicken slightly as if to push us on.

“You were saying you and Rita met in a class or something.”

“Yes. In the fall.”

I still couldn’t place his accent: Scandinavian, perhaps, or German or Dutch.

“You’re doing a degree?”

He looked a little embarrassed.

“Well, perhaps. Mainly I just do courses. What I like.”

His embarrassment made me uneasy about asking him any more questions. He was this big lump of a man, all gangly
limbs and bulk, his skin ruddy and pink as if someone had over-scrubbed it. What was he doing here, at ten on a weekday morning? It went through my mind that he was Rita’s “date” of Saturday night. But it was somehow clear that there was nothing sexual between the two of them, not merely from the few things Rita had said about him but from the plainly paternal air he had around her.

“I was wondering,” he said. “We were thinking of taking a little excursion. Because of the weather. Maybe you’d like to join us.”

An excursion. The word sounded absurd, as if we were leisured aristocrats arranging some parasolled outing to the country. Here we sat, at the frayed edge of sanity, and we were planning an excursion.

“I don’t know. There’s things I should do.”

“Yes, of course.”

I couldn’t catch Rita’s eye.

“Rita has a class at three,” I said.

John’s gaze went to Rita uncomfortably, as if this contradicted something she’d told him.

“I didn’t realize. Anyway it’s probably just review now and that sort of thing.”

I was still awaiting some sign from Rita. They would go off together and another day would pass with nothing resolved.

“Are you going far?”

“We were thinking of the zoo, actually,” John said. He looked embarrassed again. “It’s a bit of a journey to get there by transit, of course.”

“You don’t have a car?”

“No. Actually, no.”

The whole idea was crazy. It seemed there was no way to get to Rita except through this chaperon.

“We could take mine,” I said.

“Ah. Well. Yes. That’s much quicker.”

Rita was still standing at the kitchen counter.

“Is that all right with you?” I said.

“It sounds great.” Her voice was toneless, perfectly neutral.

“I’ll get my car, then.”

The zoo lay to the northeast of the city. We drove out on the Gardiner Expressway and then up the Don Valley, John in back and Rita and me together in the front. Beside me Rita sat eyes forward, in another world but also stilled somehow, as if she had moved into a new territory where anger, shame, were irrelevant, where there was only the brute fact of what had happened.

“You’re very quiet this morning,” John said.

“I’m just a little under the weather.”

“Perhaps you’ve caught something from your brother.”

The traffic moved swiftly. In the bright spring sun the speeding cars looked like night things scurrying for cover.

“So Rita tells me you grew up on a farm,” John said.

I wondered what she’d told him of the entanglements of our childhood. There was that forced quality in his question of not being certain where to begin, how much foreknowledge it was proper to reveal.

“Yes. A small one.”

“You like nature, then. Or perhaps you’ve had enough of it.”

Somehow I couldn’t connect our farm with what he seemed to mean by nature.

“Yes, I suppose,” I said.

The zoo was set out on a great sprawl of rolling woodland. Several large pavilions were clustered near the gates; beyond them, a maze of trails led past large outdoor animal runs. Despite the weather the place was almost deserted. There were a few mothers here and there pushing carriages or trailing toddlers, a few school groups that would appear from time to time, all frenzied energy and noise, then vanish again. John had put on a pair of sunglasses that gave him a slightly sinister look: I had an instant’s sense that if he removed them, some secret about him would be revealed, but when he did, to rub the bridge of his nose, they uncovered only eyes of a kind of silvery-blue indeterminateness like the colour of a river under cloud.

The trails that wound through the grounds were laid out by region, African, Eurasian, North American. We followed the African route, past a group of elephants in repose on the hard, barren earth around a scratching post, past a pair of giraffes just ducking out from a huge hangar-like shed. The giraffes moved like dream things, with their slow motion, larger-than-life unwieldiness and grace.

“You were in Africa for a while, I understand,” John said.

“Yes. In Nigeria.”

“You must have seen some game.”

“No. No. Not where I was. I saw some in the east, when I was there. In Kenya.”

“Ah. So you were in Kenya.” He seemed to register this as if it were the first piece of new information about me he’d garnered.

“You’ve been there?” I said.

“Yes. Many years ago now.”

Something in this intersection between our lives had touched a chord in him. He seemed to want to go on, but held back.

“What brought you there?” I said.

“Just travelling like that.”

“You travel quite a bit?”

“Here and there. It’s my hobby, I suppose.”

Rita had wandered ahead to the next enclosure. Despite the warmth she held the lapels of her sweater clutched tight against her as if warding off a bitter wind. She seemed hardly aware of me and John now, withdrawn into the far remoteness she would go into sometimes as a child.

“She seems very preoccupied,” John said. “Perhaps it has to do with her mother.”

“Sorry?”

“With her plans to move back to England. I think it’s very upsetting for Rita.”

At the big indoor chimp cage, she left us to use the washroom. John and I waited on a bench that faced toward the cage. A commotion of some sort, a fight, sent one of the smaller chimps scurrying toward where we were sitting. When he was safely away from danger he stopped, sat, licked at some hurt on his arm, looked furtively about. He caught sight of us watching him from our bench and stared an instant, then turned away; and then with a kind of evasive, meandering gait, as if to hide his curiosity, he began to come toward us. At the fence he stopped and gazed at us with his old man’s eyes, then stretched his fingers through the fencing’s narrow mesh as if in pleading.

John was still watching. In the absence of Rita he seemed older, diminished.

“Who was that writer, I can’t remember now. The one who talked about the first drawing by an ape and what it showed was the bars of his cage.”

Five minutes passed, then ten, and still Rita had not returned.

“Do you think we should check on her?” John said.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

I stood at the washroom door and called out to her. She appeared a moment later; I had expected tears or some outburst but she was perfectly, chillingly composed.

“Is everything okay?”

“Just feeling a little sick, that’s all. Anyway I was thinking that maybe I should try to get to that class after all. With exams coming up and everything.”

“Sure.”

We were mostly silent on the trip home. Rita had asked to be in the back so she could stretch out there. I wanted to drop John off first to get Rita alone, but he had left his bicycle at Rita’s.

“It’s getting kind of late,” Rita said. “You can just leave me at the university on your way.”

“You sure you don’t want to go home first?”

“It’s okay. I’ll be all right.”

We left her at the corner of College and St. George.

“I’ll call you,” she said. On the sidewalk, bookless and purseless, still clutching the lapels of her sweater, she looked abandoned, cut adrift. But by the time I pulled away from the curb she had already disappeared in the crowd of passersby.
I left John at Rita’s door. A few minutes later, while I was waiting for a break in traffic at the head of the street, he pulled up next to me on his bicycle and smiled, waved. He dismounted and walked the bike onto the sidewalk to cross over at the light further up, then started east along College.

I pulled out. John was already a couple of blocks ahead of me, more or less keeping pace with the traffic. I crossed Spadina, but then instead of turning in at my street I continued on, not certain why. John had stopped for a light at St. George; it only occurred to me now, as I slowed, afraid he would turn and see me, that I was following him. The light changed and John moved on. He kept up a steady clip, his legs moving regular and precise, the tail of his windbreaker flapping behind him. His bicycle was an old red C.C.M., anachronistic next to the sleeker ten-speeds people rode now; it held him dignified and straight-backed as if he were some old-world gentleman out on a Sunday tour.

Further on he turned up a sidestreet. I got held up at a light, turned, thought I had lost him, but then caught sight of him at the head of a cross-street just turning onto Yonge. When I made the corner I saw his bike, put up on its kick-stand, parked near the door of a variety store. I pulled over to wait.

It was one of the seedier stretches of Yonge Street, mainly discount stores and porn shops, army surplus, the occasional head shop or bar. When I’d first come to Toronto several years before, the long central artery Yonge Street formed had seemed the essence of what the city was, even then when it was just an endless strip of arcades and second-storey massage parlours. But now whenever I crossed it it felt like some ravine that the city’s detritus collected in, the bored
suburban kids in from the malls and the addicts and drunks in search of a fix.

Today, in the spring sun, the street looked slightly redeemed. The sidewalks were thick with pedestrians, shoppers with their parcels, young men idling outside doorways, young women in sweaters and skirts. Across the way, a moustached older man with the magisterial air of some gold-rich desert merchant had come to stand in the sun at the doorway of his shop. He took me in watching from my car and stared an instant, arms folded over his chest, then finally retreated back into the darkness of his shop.

Through the open doorway of the variety store I saw John go up to the counter, place some items there, smile at the cashier though in a tired, distracted way. The doorway I saw him through was like a frame: it held him a moment anonymous and alone, out of context, so that it seemed I was seeing him – the cut of his limbs, his simple animal presence – for the first time. Some energy seemed to pass between us as he stood there, a deep, wordless line of force as if for an instant the world had been whittled down to just the two of us: he was predator or ally or prey and I was brute instinct in the shadows, watching.

He came out of the store. I thought the intensity of my attention on him must draw his gaze in my direction. But he simply pushed his bicycle off its stand unawares, his bag of purchases balanced off its handle, and walked it up a bit to an unmarked door wedged between two storefronts. Leaning the bicycle against his hip, he pulled a set of keys from his pocket and opened the door. So he lived here, then, in one of the second-storey flats that rose up above the shops. With a single
deft movement, he swung his bike over his shoulder and disappeared with it through the doorway. I waited, staring up at the curtained windows of the second floor. Sure enough, after several minutes, one of the curtains opened and John appeared at the window there, still in his windbreaker. For a moment he stood staring down into the street like some sea captain gauging the threat of a coming storm; and then the curtain closed.

Two days went by before I saw Rita again, from the car as I was driving westward past the university buildings on College. I recognized her from behind: she was dressed in the same sweater and jeans she’d worn to the zoo, as if she’d simply been wandering this stretch of sidewalk since I’d dropped her here two days earlier.

I pulled up beside her.

“Would you like a ride?”

For a moment, she seemed truly not to recognize me.

“Oh.” She stared up the street an instant as if to gauge the distance home. “Sure.”

In the car, a silence. I had waited for her call after our day with John, but it hadn’t come.

“Coming from school?” I said.

“Yeah. The library.”

But she wasn’t carrying any books.

It was a grey early evening. All day, rain had been threatening and now it began, a fine drizzle that hit the car with a
sound like needles spilling. On the sidewalks, people ducked into doorways or raised newspapers above their heads to shield themselves.