Parallel Rivers Page 9

  The arcade was closed; the video monitors displayed to one another. He was unable to locate Sid’s basement apartment. He telephoned Renée, hung up when her sleepy voice answered. He shoved a finger down his throat, but couldn’t vomit. In shop-window light, he took the crushed yellow box with its blue lid from his windbreaker pocket and without looking inside balanced it on end on the ledge. In the shop a mannequin revolved. Her hands were begging someone to do something. He couldn’t imagine what. He kneeled in front of the shop. He couldn’t think straight, it was so cold, no, so hot, he was sweating, and he felt tired, no, frantic.

  Back inside his apartment, he pressed his forehead against the locked door and tried to swallow. Father in Heaven. For what we’re about to receive. He put a hand to his mouth and tried to smell his breath. He should wash his hair. He had heartburn from the fried food. Hadn’t he had a bath today? Simultaneously, he remembered the money he’d left in the parkade and saw the white envelope lying flat on the tiles at his feet. He tore it open.

  An insect in its final and perfect stage, after all its metamorphoses, is called an imago. You showed me a male imago…

  She must have pushed it under his door. When? He scanned the words, looking for a personal message, looked at the base of the page for a signature.

  The imagos of this species build a dome of eggs and dead until the hemisphere is perfect and only one female is left.

  He picked up the envelope which had fallen to the floor and read his name neatly printed on the face. Gerald Thonger.

  After her solo dance on the completed dome, she flies away in search of a new home.

  He opened the fridge and took out a bottle of Coke and a quart of milk, rinsed a glass at the sink and mixed a little milk with the coke and drank it down.

  She carries now only the perfection of the dome. She deposits in a new place two eggsacs side by side, and dies. The corpse and the eggsacs form the symbol for the word therefore, the cornerstone of the new hive.

  He refilled his glass with Coke and milk and carried the drink and the page and envelope over to the table. Sitting heavily, he studied the grain of the paper. The envelope was made from a sheet of ninety-pound Clairefontaine. He’d never seen such a sequence of folds. The sheet that had been enclosed was of the same stock, folded in thirds. The words were in copperplate, the lines contained no errors.

  What is the meaning of so many imagos? What is the message of such a flight? Do all hives explode at once into a host of drones? They do, once the female has left.

  The hives under construction emit a C sharp buzz. Drones in flight buzz in A. Can you imagine entire valleys filled with the melodious blending of these two notes? There is a third note: the occasional shriek (high F) of a moribund female about to arrange her egg-sacs.

  In the straight-backed chair near the wide-open window, Gerald remained slumped over the paper for a long time. He didn’t understand. You’re wearing too many clothes, man. The traffic noise had long since settled into its nocturnal purr. But maybe Lucy hadn’t recognized him. What had she been doing down there? Somebody gonna jump, or what? He raised his head, rubbed his eyes; looking ahead into the pale first light, he drew a deep breath, then leaning forward he blew, one by one, the coloured animals from the sill into the world.

  The Blue Jays got rained out in Cleveland.

  PARALLEL RIVERS

  IT WAS THE SUMMER WE DISCOVERED that blue blue shade of ultramarine. By staring at it long and hard in early or late sun. Natalie, old enough to know better, had been standing on her head for days. The uncles came and went every weekend, visiting Mama’s sickbed. They all tried to coax Natalie to her feet, tempting her with fairytale books whose covers were just that blue. I hated kissing the uncles, their mustaches tickled. In September Natalie was to go to Constance Spry’s Flower School in London. I was envious. I occupied myself in the garden most days, trying to see flowers as books. Unlike Natalie, I had to keep moving, keep doing something.

  I felt like a bee, though, not a scholar.

  We found, hour by hour, Mama’s room swimming with colour, deep and sad by night, but so light and pure when on calm clear days the curtains were thrown wide, that we looked in amazement at each other. Mother’s skin had become translucent. I watched the veins travel her arms, the arms continually trying to bury themselves in the bedclothes. Natalie refused to look. An uncle would take Mama’s hand, “Now, Agnes,” stilling the veins. “Girls,” he’d turn to us, “Natalie, Hannah, come along, let your mother rest.” That wing of the house, upstairs and left along the landing, grew quieter and quieter all summer; with the flowers we carried, more and more fragrant.

  Mother had always intended to teach us weaving, but Natalie was not interested, and I could never sit still long enough. On the wall of Natalie’s bedroom hung a silk tapestry Mother had done on a handloom when Daddy was alive. Vivid areas of yellow and green, like a cornfield, traversed at intervals by meandering blue lines of various widths. Mother called the hanging Parallel Rivers.

  “Natalie, I’d like you to meet Larry. He’s going to start living with me full time in the summer. Larry, this is my sister, Natty, from Canada.”

  The lean energy in my house. I feel deliciously wicked. I let Larry take several biscuits from the plate before I push it closer to Natalie.

  “Please may I be excused, Auntie Hannah?”

  “All right. Finish your milk and you’re excused.”

  He ducks his head, gulps down the milk, and mumbles “ . . . meet you” to my sister, before racing from the room.

  “Oh, Hannah!” says Natty.

  And I can’t help the smile at my lips. My sister has been slowed by this unexpected boy. “Well, I’m going to look after him. Don’t start fretting, Natty, let’s not set off on the wrong foot.”

  We stand awkwardly by the window, hugging. It’s been such a long time. Too many things have happened.

  “Dear, dear,” she says as we hold tight.

  “I’m happy to see you, love,” I whisper.

  And we turn to look out of the window. We have compared our bodies and had our tea. And now at last have broken the ice. Uneasy all the way from the airport, along motorways, commenting on English fields, the quaint stone hedges, through sad café meals and stilted conversations about our lives, pecking each other’s cheek goodnight at the three B & Bs, and we are close again, yet already sensing the certainty of another horrid goodbye, perhaps a final one. She feels soft in my arms, my sister.

  “Look at your garden in the sun,” she says, and her voice is so subdued that we begin silently to laugh.

  “Hannah Meerschaum! Hannah Meerschaum! What are you doing?” Natalie shouted from under the willow tree. “Are you trying to frighten me?”

  “I’m a marionette.” And I flicked up the hem of my frock. I twisted round till my nose bobbed against a soft cloud of yellow roses. Hopped three steps backward, then sprawled at my sister’s side. “You’ve been on your head for hours. Your nose is red, Natty. Your face gets redder and redder all the time.”

  Natalie slowly lowered her legs, then lay facedown on the grass, while I counted to twelve. I counted back from twelve to one and said: “Hannah counts twelve. Born December twelfth, 1924, twelve years old, lives at number twelve, yesterday swam twelve strokes. Hannah.”

  “You don’t live at number twelve. Are the uncles here yet?”

  “The Gruff and The Stern. The Comical has not yet arrived.”

  I rolled closer and stared into her eyes. “I’ll hypnotize you into a mushroom.”

  “The grass is hissing and hissing,” she said. “The blue sky is a tremendous iron, and the wet woods will soon be flat.”

  “Am I right way up today, Natty?”

  “I can’t tell while we’re lying down.”

  “Tell the puppeteer to pull my strings — look at the butterfly!” I leapt to give chase.

  “Hannah, don’t be a child. Remember The Gruff. ‘It’s undignified for young ladies to run.’” Natalie sa
t up, cocked her head to one side then the other. “Um. I feel dizzy. You are upside-down, you know.”

  “No, I’m not. But how pale you look. Manny told me we have to go and see the uncles. He wants to water this part of the garden. Coming?”

  “Help me stand. I’m weak, so weak. ‘I’m a lone lorn creeture,’ Silly, I’m only playing. Hannah, was The Gruff wearing his waistcoat and morning coat, or just his waistcoat?”

  “His waistcoat and. He looked three times at his gold watch!”

  “Oh, gracious! Three times?”

  “Mother was worse yesterday, wasn’t she? That’s why I had to go swimming with The Comical, wasn’t it?”

  But all forms of love are fermentable, hence corruptible. I can’t seem to shake this headache. I must be catching a cold, and the gin’s no help at all; it goes straight to my head to make me maudlin.

  Natalie’s in the kitchen telling Larry about Ladysmith, British Columbia, where she now lives. He’s saying to her that when she’s gone he’ll have her room. Such tact.

  Today, when he was at school, we drove to the Lleyn Peninsula, had tea outside at Pwllheli. Natalie bought us lunch, beef and onion pie, at Ty Newedd Hotel in Aberdaron, where we drank beer and learned that the publican was a poet named Jonathan Williams. We giggled to ourselves, then she told me how last June she and her husband had made love on a blanket somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. Bully for her, as George used to say. Bully for her, then!

  “It’s still wonderful, Hannah. Not just the preliminaries, but the act itself. It takes longer, of course. For both of us it’s always terrific. Oh, we’ve had our ups and downs, after forty years who wouldn’t . . . But he’s never once looked at another woman, and I’m not in the least interested, never have been, in anyone else . . . ”

  Lucky Natalie. Still energetic, effusive, she keeps her happy blinkered outlook intact. One man, two children, one love.

  “Shall we be reckless and have one more pint?” she said. “Hannah, you look so fit, I can’t get over it! I know it’s been tough for you. With George and everything. Looking at you I believe that things can always be good again. You must come over and visit. I insist. Malcolm would love to see you. I insist.”

  Now she comes to bring me cocoa and vitamin C. I watch her as she bustles about the room, hanging up my clothes.

  “Don’t smile, your face’ll crack,” she says. “This takes me back. Tucking you into bed. Want a moth’s kiss?”

  “Don’t be daft.” I laugh. “Don’t look so chipper now, do I?”

  “A good night’s rest is what you need. Too much excitement. Night night!”

  Already I regret my harsh words of the afternoon. I had to make her look outside her own blissful world, if only for a second, and I hurt her. She was quiet the rest of the outing. From Aberdaron we drove the headland to the cliffs overlooking Bardsey Island. So beautiful, yet we shared nothing.

  At the pub I’d said, “Just listen a minute, and don’t interrupt. Please. Your pity stifles me.” I was beginning my headache. “Do shut up and listen. All right? I sometimes want to thump something very hard, to wake myself up, but know that if the blow is aimed right it’ll mean the end of me. People call these black thoughts. Now, Natalie, if you get upset, I’ll just stop talking and that’ll be that. There are one or two moments of pure joy at the outset of a relationship. People say falling in love. Yes, I’ve fallen in love. But then they say deeper in love, with time. Poppycock! Desire for one person, someone you can hold — against being alone — can be very beautiful, to be sure. But the love fades away! I’ve seen too much for that blindness. It upsets me to hear you going on like a teenager. We had no children, so what? After George — Ah, I don’t know which of us is standing on her head . . . I want to go to the toilet.”

  With George on the cliffs over Bardsey. Hot westering sun, skylarks plunging. We sat against a mossy stone wall, shared a chocolate bar, Toblerone, and dozed.

  After Mother died, Natalie and I slept in the same bed until it was time for her to go to London. Once, she woke me at dawn and told me she’d dreamt she was blind and had to learn to arrange flowers by sense of smell. The next day we spent hours walking in the garden. We took turns wearing a blindfold. I remember a black day filled with too-sweet flowers: stock, sweet violet, heliotrope, lavender. The grass cool and moist to our feet. And coming from dark into a blinding white world; Manny the gardener leaning on a rake in the distance watching us, the windows of the curtained house hard and secretive. I felt alone that day. I understood then that we were rehearsing our coming separation. Much later, when I talked about this with Natalie, she agreed.

  “Yes,” she said in her fast singsong. “I felt very concerned about you, about your future. Remember you told me, when I had the mask on, that I was invisible? That you couldn’t see me at all? That the bouquet of flowers was drifting about the lawn all by itself. That the scissors were poised and slashing, poised and slashing. That steps were making themselves in the wet grass, and the snapdragon patch was dividing like the Red Sea for Moses. You were angry with me for being afraid and taking off the mask before it was time.”

  By turns the uncles tried to console us with walks in the country, a weekend in Harrogate, one — The Gruff — even suggested we be sent on a tour abroad. They broke it to us as gently as they could, the plain truth we had guessed well before Mother’s death, that the house must be sold, that we must begin to take our place in the world, to become young women, and marriageable. We never had our trip on the continent; The Gruff was overruled in this by the others. We were separated, Natalie to London, I to a cousin, stuck-up daughter of the worst uncle, The Stern, in Wales.

  I fell in love with Wales, later with a Welshman.

  What’s the use.

  Youngsters have been painting slogans on the walls of Harlech Castle. Natalie and I take the train along the Cardigan coast. The pale sea cool company to our right, its horizon cleverly concealed. Airforce jets a brief shriek overhead.

  “Fine to see the sun,” Natalie remarks.

  “Yes, it’s lovely.”

  “Oh, but look, someone’s written on the castle. How terrible. Women should take over the world: it needs mending. What a stupid thing to do.” Once Harlech is out of sight, however, “I suppose it does need mending,” she says, “doesn’t it, Hannah? That’s what Phoebe always says. Did I tell you her latest? You should —”

  “We’re not menders, Natty. You must see that. Just because mending and healing are the only powers allowed us —”

  “You’re so bitter, Hannah.”

  I stand for an hour in the living room, in the sun, listening to George’s recordings of the American pianist Bill Evans. I try to remember whether or not George was serious when he told me he loved Bill Evans because of his Welsh name. I remember much these days, but not this. When Natalie comes home from the shops, she’s flustered; quite bluntly she questions me. We sit facing each other. She wants to know about George. Now, after all these years, she wants to know what went wrong. But I do not care to talk to her about George.

  Instead, we recollect summers passed together, uncle tales, playing blind in the flowers, and we drink port until I have another headache.

  “I gave that tapestry to Manny, you know, the Parallel Rivers?”

  “Which?” she says.

  “You remember. It used to hang in your room. Yellow and green, with wavy blue lines.” She’s shaking her head. “Natty, you must remember.”

  “No. I’m sorry. Is it important? I think we’re drinking too much. Let’s eat something.”

  “We must eat something, yes.” I’d intended to surprise her with the Rivers. When Manny died I’d recovered possession of the tapestry, and it was rolled now in my closet. For months I’d planned giving it to her, imagined how her face in that instant would reveal everything — she would be absolutely real to me. How can she not remember!

  “By the way, Phoebe plans to come next year, did I say?”

  “Yes you di
d. You’re always talking about Phoebe. How is Alan?”

  “Oh, he’s very well. He has opened an antique business in Vancouver. Sketchy area, but he is thriving. Remember Bergamot?” she exclaims.

  “Yes! Bergamot . . . I’ve not thought of Bergie in years.” Pretty little collie. Our dog. Bergie!

  “George used to like that music, didn’t he? He liked jazz, I recall.”

  Jazz. Yes, George liked jazz.

  “Malcolm and I want to go to the festival in Monterey next year. California, that is. I bet George would’ve —”

  “Natalie, I don’t feel like talking about George.”

  “Sorry.”

  She said sorry. I can’t reach her. She wants from me the only thing I can’t give her. Are we finally separate, then? After all these years of actual distance. So close in letters, in tremulous telephone calls. She looks wrinkled, but vivacious. Her worried smile irks me so.

  “God, you look young,” I say. “And you’re older than I.”

  Soon it will be summer again and Larry will move in permenantly. These years I seem to slip through seasons as if through veils. Cold silk, warm silk, static-filled, or damp. The dance of the veils! But instead of taking them off I seem to be adding, sensation after sensation, until my sense of wonder is so muffled, my sense of the world so generally confused, that I’ll soon be a haggard crone, flat on her back under a heap of soiled bedding. Romantic tosh! There’s life in the old bird yet, I’ve a long way to go, God willing, before they smell self-pity on me!