Your Sad Eyes And Unforgettable Mouth Part 14

"Yeah, he was really good. Everyone loved him."

"Oh?" Dr. Moore's smile was partly diffident, partly pleased, the smile of an adult opening a birthday gift. Then I saw that she was trembling slightly. I was shocked, and thought I'd misperceived some small movement, but no, her entire body was trembling. I remembered Gerald's letter and felt abashed.

"He was great. We adored him." But I added, stupidly, "He made us laugh," and ruined everything. Her smile faded into covert disappointment, an acknowledgment of Anthony's failings, or maybe his unhappiness, which she'd known about all along. Not her son the beloved but her son the clown. Like Patrick, she shut down, and the trembling ceased.

Patrick had had enough. He got up and left the room.

I waved idiotically to Dr. Moore and followed him. "' Gimme shelter,'" I sang under my breath as we returned to Patrick's lair.

I sat on Patrick's ugly kitchen chair, shut my eyes, breathed in deeply, exhaled. For the first time in weeks, I wasn't about to blow a fuse or go to war with a jammed zipper. The monkey was on Patrick's back. It had been there all along, of course, but I only saw it now, and somehow it made mine superfluous. I had witnessed a scene as unruly and peculiar as any in my own home. With a gift of this magnitude, I no longer had any urge to lash out.

There were two knocks on the door, followed by the sound of footsteps quickly retreating, clomp clomp clomp, down the stairs. The knocks were Mr. Davies's signal that food had been set out in the kitchen. "Why is he running away?" I asked.

"He doesn't want anyone to expect him to talk."

"I guess your mom doesn't like to cook?"

"She's into food. He makes things like partridges for her."

Mr. Davies had left a vegetarian lasagne and a mushroom pie downstairs on the kitchen table-both culinary masterpieces, as anyone could see. Yet as far as Patrick was concerned, they might have been sc.r.a.ps left for stray animals. He heaped a mid-sized serving of each dish onto a plate and, still standing, ate so rapidly and blindly that he seemed to be neither chewing nor swallowing. It was as if he had shut himself down again, had cancelled the very act of eating. I'd never seen anything like it. Even Bubby, with her deliberate efficiency, was a gourmande gourmande next to Patrick. "Well, see you upstairs," he said, when he'd finished. He dropped his plate in the sink and left me alone with my meal. next to Patrick. "Well, see you upstairs," he said, when he'd finished. He dropped his plate in the sink and left me alone with my meal.

I, on the other hand, was in food heaven. Mr. Davies was brilliant, no doubt about it. I stuffed myself until I was bursting at the seams, then made my way back upstairs.

Patrick was kneeling on the living-room rug, setting a lit match to the bowl of a gold water pipe. The pipe was too pretty, I felt, to be taken seriously-it looked more like a trinket or a toy. Go ask Alice ... Go ask Alice ... if a caterpillar in a children's book could puff on something like this, so could I. But as soon as I tasted the bitter smoke I pushed the thin tube away, grimacing. It was too late. A procession of dream images floated before me: my mother bouncing and pouncing like a deranged human strapped to a flying machine, Vera Moore slyly quoting bits of Hegel as she plunged her fork into Mr. Davies's partridges, Mr. Michaeli wilting under paper airplanes. Rosie in a white sari, pretending to be dead on a bed of Archie comics. if a caterpillar in a children's book could puff on something like this, so could I. But as soon as I tasted the bitter smoke I pushed the thin tube away, grimacing. It was too late. A procession of dream images floated before me: my mother bouncing and pouncing like a deranged human strapped to a flying machine, Vera Moore slyly quoting bits of Hegel as she plunged her fork into Mr. Davies's partridges, Mr. Michaeli wilting under paper airplanes. Rosie in a white sari, pretending to be dead on a bed of Archie comics.

"You should be nicer to your mother," I said. "Though who am I to talk?"

"I'm very nice to her," Patrick replied, as if amused to find himself wrongfully accused. The opium had driven away his anger, and suddenly he reminded me of Anthony. Anthony did the same thing-spoke elliptically, humorously-the only difference was the aggression. Patrick had it, Anthony didn't.

"Did you know your father wrote about your mother's past in a notebook?"

Patrick seemed to be half-asleep: his legs were stretched out in front of him on the carpet, and he was leaning against the sofa cus.h.i.+ons, his head tilted back, his eyes shut. "Yes," he said. "The famous notebook."

"Did you read it?"

"No, and I never will. I'm phobic about things like that."

"Yeah, me too," I said, and at that moment I felt close to Patrick, and I wanted to squeeze his hand, but he would have pulled away, and that realization pushed the moment aside.

I don't know how long I stayed there, sprawled in the armchair, staring into s.p.a.ce. When it was time to go, I offered to take the bus home.

"No, no," Patrick said, pulling himself up. "I'll drive you."

"Are you hallucinating?" I asked.

He gave a stoned laugh. "It takes more than this."

The next day I returned to St. Mary's with a contrite heart. My unwinding was now in its last stages and like a spinning top rocking unsteadily to a halt, I felt slightly off-balance as I slowed down.

"I'm starving," Rosie said, as soon as she saw me.

"So am I. And I finished all my soda crackers on the bus. Sorry!"

"Wait here-I'll see what I can find at the cafeteria."

There were several other visitors in the waiting room, all of them silent and glum and in a state of contained tension, as if their clothes were scratchy and the air was too dry. I began to feel suffocated by their presence, so I strolled down the hallway, checked in on Mr. Michaeli.

He had a private room-I suppose the bed situation in hospitals was not as dire forty years ago. He appeared to be sleeping, but the heavy door creaked as I pulled it back, and he opened his eyes. His lips curved into his familiar disconcerting smile, tenuous and dismissive. "Ah, Maya! How are you, our good friend, Maya? Every time I see you, I forget how tall you are and how long is your hair. I knew once a girl with such red hair as yours. We called her Lita. She's dead, unfortunately."

"What exactly is wrong with you?" I asked him.

"What's wrong, what's wrong, who knows! The doctors like to invent problems. Everywhere they look, they see a problem. Kidney, problem. Heart, problem. Stomach, problem."

"My father's lungs were damaged in the war."

"So far, they have not found a lung problem. Maybe if we give them another week."

"You're the opposite of a hypochondriac."

"That means?"

"Someone who thinks something's always wrong with them. Like in that play by Moliere."

"Ah, Moliere. When I was a boy, my father took me to Moliere. And now here I am speaking to you in a hospital in Canada about Moliere. And my father is dead. In German we saw it, or maybe in Yiddish. Yiddish theatre was big business. Let me tell you, Jews love plays. Too bad we ended up attending the worst play in history."

"Who cares," I said, and instantly-for the first time-I regretted the heartless dismissal, but the words were out and they hung in the air like gla.s.s birds.

"I agree. Some things are too far from the mind to understand."

I walked to the window and looked down. Tiny toy people, tiny toy cars.

"Maya, come here. This is not your problem. And your mother, I saw her on a date. She is-how did my little Rosie say-courted? By a very nice man. They were in a restaurant holding hands."

"My mother!"

"And for who you think she wears that perfume? For you?"

"I can't believe it."

"We all saw, and my Rosie said, wouldn't Maya be surprised. And I say, better not tell, it could be a secret. But now out of the bag I spill the beans."

I tried to picture it-my mother and a suitor, at a restaurant, holding hands. What most startled me was that my mother could keep something to herself. I had not thought her capable of even the smallest subterfuge, this woman who recounted to anyone who would listen her close calls with reckless drivers and rancid b.u.t.ter. Not to mention the ongoing forays into a disjointed alternate universe.

And of course, beyond that, what man would choose to spend time with a woman most people crossed the street to avoid?

"What's he like?" I asked.

"They were speaking Yiddish. Maybe in Yiddish your mother is more herself. He was dressed well, in a suit and tie. His shoes were s.h.i.+ny. I would say he is a quiet man."

A quiet man! Well, he'd have to be, wouldn't he?

A nurse peeped in, nodded cryptically, disappeared.

All at once, in a surge of irritation and disgust, Mr. Michaeli said, "My wife and daughter don't want to let me go. Already in the Red Cross I was ready to die, but my wife insists for her sake I live. Why this fear? Death, you know, is nothing. But Gitte believes in getting back. Showing them you won. So here I am, waiting for my gold medal."

"They love you," I said.

But his outburst had exhausted him. "Yes, yes," he said, his voice retreating. "Love we definitely have." He shut his eyes; he wanted me to leave.

It seems we have countless ways of knowing-we surmise; we half-know; we know and don't know-and everything between. With dismaying clarity, Mr. Michaeli had spelled it out for me: Rosie's project was to offer compensation for her father's suffering by means of her talent for happiness, while Mr. Michaeli's project was to satisfy Rosie and Mrs. Michaeli by staying alive.

"I'll wait outside," I whispered. I wasn't sure whether he could still hear me.

I returned to the waiting room and considered the news of my mother's secret courts.h.i.+p. In fact, it made sense: for the past few months she'd been taking off several times a week, right after dinner. If before Mr. Michaeli's revelation I thought about these excursions with anything other than relief, I must have supposed that my mother's circle of card-players was expanding.

She had also made herself some new outfits recently: a sequined black dress, a white jacket with a purple collar. Her soft cherubic knees were now in view; her lipstick was palest pink. Wandering into her room one evening I had come across a paperback ent.i.tled, remarkably, How to Ma.s.sage Your Man How to Ma.s.sage Your Man. All the same, it hadn't crossed my mind that in the real world there might be a man for her to ma.s.sage. I was accustomed to thinking of my mother as sole inhabitant of a microcosm that no one could alter, and that, therefore, no one could enter.

I felt betrayed, until it occurred to me that an entire area of discourse was in fact consistently absent from my mother's fractured soliloquies. The taboo subject wasn't s.e.x; on the contrary, when free love was celebrated as a revolutionary concept I thought both its proponents and its critics were strangely obsessive.

Rather, it was the future that, apart from generalized presentiments of disaster, was missing from our lives. I'd never heard my mother mention prospects or plans; we avoided discussing even the week ahead, never mind the broader outlines of hope and desire. I once showed my poor mother a photograph of mirrors reflecting each other to infinity. I was fascinated by the photo: we humans were truly amateurs, incapable even of grasping a concept as basic as endlessness. But Fanya covered her eyes and backed away-don't don't show me already I am dizzy- It was not, therefore, a polite Russian man my mother was hiding; it was what he might be planning for the two of them.

I leaned my head against the wall and stared at the fluorescent lights. t.i.torelli ... t.i.torelli ... t.i.torelli ... t.i.torelli ... I was a frequent patron of the Verdi, a repertory cinema on St. Laurent Street that ignored the censors.h.i.+p board's eighteen-and-over age restrictions. I enjoyed it all: the good, the bad, and the s.e.xist. David Hemmings's libidinous camera and gestalt investigations in I was a frequent patron of the Verdi, a repertory cinema on St. Laurent Street that ignored the censors.h.i.+p board's eighteen-and-over age restrictions. I enjoyed it all: the good, the bad, and the s.e.xist. David Hemmings's libidinous camera and gestalt investigations in Blowup Blowup; Rita Tus.h.i.+ngham wide-eyed and overwhelmed in The Knack The Knack; circus burlesque and hat fetishes in Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits Juliet of the Spirits. Other movies educated me: the focus on c.u.n.n.i.l.i.n.g.u.s in some obscure Swedish film was particularly illuminating. And if I had trouble falling asleep at night, I had only to think of Romy Schneider displaying her webbed fingers to Josef K and asking, Has she any physical defect Has she any physical defect? or recall the mad, lascivious laughter of the wild girls who reached out through bamboo bars and cried out, t.i.torelli, t.i.torelli ... t.i.torelli, t.i.torelli ... and I'd drift off. and I'd drift off.

I drifted off now in the waiting room chair, and in Proustian pre-sleep I reconstructed the words tinker tailor soldier sailor tinker tailor soldier sailor according to shape and size and colour. I had a confused notion that when I graduated I'd find a job diving underwater in search of people who had lost their vision by drowning. I'd bring them to sh.o.r.e and teach them Braille. according to shape and size and colour. I had a confused notion that when I graduated I'd find a job diving underwater in search of people who had lost their vision by drowning. I'd bring them to sh.o.r.e and teach them Braille.

By the time Rosie returned from the cafeteria I was wide awake. She handed me a container of rice pudding and a plastic spoon.

"Ooh, yummy," I said. "Thanks, Rosie."

"How did it go at Patrick's?" she asked.

"It was crazy. Patrick played chess with his mother and they talked about Hegel Hegel!"

And the word, for teenaged-girl reasons, made us collapse into helpless giggles.

1973.

I've come to the last diary, the one that seems to glow like kryptonite, the one that marks off a before and an after. This is where they make their appearance, the demons who rise from the underworld to clutch at our ankles.

It's silver, in fact, this notebook, not kryptonite green; I remember how pleased I was with the colour when I bought it, just before we graduated-how fitting it seemed, for soon I'd be starting a new life, and who knew what splendour it would bring?

You think you can change things when you're young, that you control the plot, and if something goes wrong, that you can step over it and move on. If your raft capsizes, you can swim to sh.o.r.e, even make a sport of it.

I did swim into this afterlife, this aftermath, but it strikes me, now and then, that I may have headed in the wrong direction.

We wrote our last matriculation exam on a Friday morning in late June. I could hardly believe as I put down my pencil that I was free, absolutely free, for the rest of my life, to do as I pleased.

I had picked up a velvety blue-green corduroy s.h.i.+rt, and I wore it everywhere. My mother had sewn two embroidered bands onto the ends of my bell-bottom jeans, and I'd found a perfect pair of leather sandals with braided straps for only three dollars. I had a hat too-a funny, floppy felt hat, and Janis Joplin sungla.s.ses. Janis herself had died, along with other music celebrities, and we were at the tail end of the hippie era, but the defiant, pacifist spirit and flower-strewn iconography were still a part of the landscape.

What I wanted now was a celebration. "I'll die if I don't go somewhere," I said for the third time that afternoon. Rosie and I were sitting at my kitchen table, nibbling on Bubby's fruit salad. Rosie didn't like the grapefruit, I didn't like the sliced banana, so we traded. "Where can we go?" I whined. "There must be somewhere."

Rosie was also at sea: that morning, her parents had left for Paris with a small group of post-war immigrants from Europe. Mr. Michaeli had resisted at first, but his wife was suddenly animated-even the colour of her eyes seemed to change from dull grey to soft blue. As far as I could tell, Mr. Michaeli felt it would be inexcusable to hold her back; he had commented more than once that she hadn't known what she was going into when she married him. As for his health, a new drug had worked wonders, and his doctor said he could travel if he didn't overstrain himself.

The wonderful coincidence-Rosie available just as I was hankering to get away-proved that it was meant to be.

"We need someone rich," I said. "Someone who can drive us and pay all our expenses."

"Patrick!" we exclaimed in unison. Rosie wasn't entirely serious, but I immediately began looking for his number.

Though Patrick and I had not stayed in touch, and I hadn't heard from Anthony, I often thought of the Moores in their various hideaways around the globe: monastery, attic, mansion, LA.

I dialled Patrick's number. "This isn't Giovanni's Gardening Supplies," he said glumly.

"Patrick? Is that you? It's Maya."

"Oh, hi." He seemed pleased to hear from me. "I keep getting calls for this gardening supplies store. They printed my number on some flyer or something."

"How are you?" I asked. "Rosie's here, she says hi."

"I'm the same," he said with his signature sigh.

"Listen, can we come over? We want to ask you something."

"Yeah, sure. You want a lift?"

He remembered my address and said he'd be there soon. Rosie and I sat by the front window, on the lookout for a white Mercedes. "Where should we ask him to take us?" I wondered, drumming my fingers impatiently on the sill.

"Ottawa?"

"Ottawa! I was thinking of something a little more exciting, Rosie-like the Rockies, maybe. A road trip, right across Canada-that would be cool. Like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, except we wouldn't be as obnoxious as those guys. Or stoned out of our skulls."

"Let's get stoned!" Rosie cheered, and we belted out an unrestrained, partly improvised rendition of "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35." We moved on to "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and were in the midst of making loud, silly sniffing noises along with reluctantly aging Lather when Patrick's car screeched to a stop in front of the house. We sprinted downstairs and toppled onto the leather seats. Patrick was half-baffled, half-relieved by our giddiness. He'd grown a beard since we last saw him, a friendly, curly beard with surprising threads of gold.

"Cute beard," I said. "Makes you look like Che Guevara."

"I just got bored shaving. What did you want to ask?"

We told him what we had in mind.

"The Rockies ..." he said doubtfully. "That seems like a long way off. I mean, what if we get on each other's nerves? We'll be stuck. But ... well, I'm not sure it's still around, but we used to have a country house up north. You could go there, if it hasn't been vandalized. Or sold. I'll have to ask my mother."

Rosie, who was sitting in front, touched Patrick's shoulder in grat.i.tude. He drew away with an unmistakable flinch. Rosie wasn't offended. She turned around and said, "It is kind of far. What if I have to come home suddenly? What if Daddy has to come back? I wouldn't want to be way out in Alberta!"

Patrick's body relaxed, though whether because Rosie had withdrawn her hand or the plan, I wasn't sure.