Life Before Man Page 8

  But that doesn't seem to be the point.

  Saturday, November 20, 1976

  NATE

  The three of them, ahead of him, indistinct in the cavernous dark. Monsters loom over them, reptilian, skeletal, wired into poses of menace as in some gargantuan tunnel of horrors. Nate feels his bones eroding, stone filling the cavities. Trapped. Run Nancy, run Janet, or time will overtake you, you too will be caught and frozen. But Nancy, secure in the belief that he can't see her, is calmly picking her nose.

  Lesje's silhouette bends towards the children. Elongated: Our Lady of the Bones. " 'Extinct' means there aren't any more of them," she says. Nate hopes she won't find his children ignorant or stupid. He's sure he's explained to them several times what "extinct" means. And they've visited this gallery often, though Nancy prefers the Egyptian mummies and Janet likes the armor, the lords and ladies. Are they playing up to Lesje to help him out, asking questions to counterfeit interest, are they already that perceptive, that sly? Is he that obvious?

  "Why not?" Janet says. "Why are they all extinct?"

  "No one really knows," Lesje says. "The world changed, and the new conditions weren't suitable for them." She pauses. "We've found quite a few eggs with baby dinosaurs in them. Towards the end, they didn't even hatch."

  "It got too cold, you turkey," Nancy says to Janet. "It was the Ice Age."

  "Well, not exactly," Lesje begins, but thinks better of it.

  She turns back towards him, hesitating, waiting.

  Nancy runs, tugs at his arm to make him bend down. She wants to see the mummies now, she whispers. Janet, his squeamish one, will protest, there will be a compromise, time will flow on; soon everyone will be one day older.

  How could he desert them? Could he endure those prearranged Saturday outings? To see them only once a week, for that would be the price, the pound of flesh. How've you been, kids. Great, Dad. Stilted. No bedtime stories, impromptu chases along the hallway, voices at the cellar door. Unfair. But it will be that or some other unfairness, Lesje, as yet untouched, intact, weeping in a bedroom doorway somewhere in the future. Bright paint flaking from her, pieces of thin curved glass, a broken ornament. As for him, slivers in his murderous hands, sitting in the bar at the Selby Hotel, pondering the ethical life. Would he be any better off than he is now? He would watch hockey games with the other drinkers, echoing their raucous cheers. The ethical life. He'd been taught it was the only desirable goal. Now that he no longer believes it's possible, why does he keep on trying to lead it?

  Limping home from school, purple and cut because his mother had forbidden him to fight. Even when they hit me first? Even when they hit you first. But he'd thought of a way around her. They were beating up a smaller boy. Not good enough. Three against one. Still not good enough. They called him a kike. Ah, that did it. Fire flashed from her eyes. In the name of tolerance, kill. My beamish boy. Nate, hypocrite at six and two inches taller than any of his tormentors, fought with fierce joy, inventing new injustices to account for his triumphant black eyes. Deeds Not Creeds, as the Unitarians said.

  He can rehearse all the reasons for not acting, in this or any other situation; yet he knows his own past well enough to fear that nevertheless he will unaccountably act. Despite his scruples, and more desperately, more senselessly because of them. Because of his selfishness, as someone will be sure to point out. Not Elizabeth though. She claims she doesn't care what he does, who his ladyfriends are, as she puts it, as long as the children are protected. As she also puts it. She means her children. Nate is sure she's secretly convinced she conceived them through parthenogenesis, having conveniently forgotten the night of the bath towel and the other night, the many other nights. Laziness and habit. As for him, he'd like to think his children had sprung fully formed from his forehead. Then they would be entirely his.

  As it is, Nate knows who would get the children. Though they've never discussed separating. Even during the worst times, she's never told him to leave, he's never threatened it. But it hangs between them in every conversation; it's the secret weapon, the final solution, the one unspeakable thing. He suspects they both think about it almost all the time: considering, rejecting.

  Better to stop now. Instead of sweeping Lesje up from the carpeted floor of the Vertebrate Evolution Gallery and running up the stairs with her to the seclusion of Mammals and Insects, he'll thank her and shake her hand, touching her anyway that once, the long thin fingers cool in his palm. Then he'll visit the mummies and after that the suits of armor, and he'll try to avoid seeing any of these artifacts as images of himself. Outside, he'll comfort himself with popcorn and a cigarette, substitutes for the double Scotch he will by that time really need. They will wait on the stone steps of the Museum, a family, leaning against the plaque at the right-hand side of the door, THE ARTS OF MAN THROUGH ALL THE YEARS, until Elizabeth materializes from whatever limbo she's wandered off to, her stocky figure in the black coat proceeding evenly up the steps to claim them at the appointed time.

  Monday, November 29, 1976

  ELIZABETH

  Elizabeth lies propped in the bathtub. Once she took baths for pleasure; now she takes them for the same reason she eats. She's servicing her body, like servicing a car, keeping it well cleaned, its moving parts in trim, ready for the time when she may be able to use it again, inhabit it. For pleasure. She's eating too much, she knows that, but better too much than too little. Too little is the danger. She's lost the capacity to judge, since she's never really hungry. No doubt she's taking too many baths as well.

  She's careful to have the water at less than body heat, as she has a fear of falling asleep in the tub. You can drown in two inches of water. They say if the water is the same temperature as your blood your heart might stop, but only if there's something wrong with it. As far as she knows there is nothing wrong with her heart.

  She's brought work home from the office. She's bringing work home a lot, since she seems unable to concentrate on it there. She can't concentrate on it at home either, but at least there's no one who might walk in on her and find her staring at the wall. She's always done most of her own typing; she's a crack typist, why not, she did nothing but that for years, but also she doesn't like to delegate her work. She made her way up to her present position by having a good telephone manner and by always knowing the details of the job above her a little better than the person actually doing it, so she has a natural distrust of secretaries. Now, however, the paper is piling up. She'll have to seize hold soon.

  She frowns, trying to focus on the book in front of her, held up in one dry hand.

  But it is hard for us to grasp these changes. It is hard for us to put ourselves in the place of people living in the old China (as millions still live in the Third World), toiling on small plots of land, losing almost all they produce to the feudal landlords, at the mercy of floods and famine - who after a long war oust the landlord.

  Elizabeth closes her eyes. It's a catalogue, a traveling show. Peasant paintings. It's in England right now and they can have it in a couple of years, if they want it. She's supposed to be looking at the catalogue and giving feedback. She's supposed to write a memo saying whether she thinks the show would be worthwhile and interesting to the Canadian public.

  But she can't, she can't care. She can't care about the Canadian public, much less about this catalogue written by some armchair Marxist in England. From his point of view she's a landlord. She wonders about her tenants, with their sallow faces and their abnormally quiet child, dressed always a little too neatly, a little too well. They're foreigners of some kind, but Elizabeth doesn't know what and it would be rude to ask. Something from Eastern Europe, she thinks, escaped. They are unobtrusive and they pay their rent, nervously, always a day ahead. Are they fighting a long war to oust her? There are no signs of it. These paintings are from a place so utterly alien to her that it might as well be on the moon.

  She skips the introduction, turns to the pictures. New Village, New Spirit. Continue to Advan
ce. The New Look of Our Piggery. It's blatant propaganda, and the pictures are ugly. With their crude bright colors and clearly drawn smiling figures they're like the Sunday-school handouts she loathed so much as a child. Jesus loves me. She never believed that for a second. Jesus was God and God loved Auntie Muriel; Auntie Muriel was absolutely certain of that. As far as Elizabeth was concerned God could not love both her and Auntie Muriel at the same time.

  They never went to church before they moved to Auntie Muriel's. Which Auntie Muriel might have known. Elizabeth won a prize for memorizing scripture verses. Caroline, on the other hand, made a spectacle of herself. It was Easter; they had on their new blue hats, with the elastic that cut into Elizabeth's chin, and the matching coats. Size ten and size seven but identical: Auntie Muriel loved dressing them like twins. The pulpit was banked with daffodils but the minister was not talking about the Resurrection. He preferred Judgment. And the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood, and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, and the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together.

  Elizabeth pleated and unpleated her picture of Christ coming out of the hole in the rock, his face translucent, two blue women kneeling before him. She folded his head back, then pulled the top of the paper, making him pop up again like a jack-in-the-box. The church smelled of perfume, too strong, waves of dusting powder from Auntie Muriel beige and upright beside her. She wanted to take off her coat. Look, look, said Caroline, standing up. She was pointing at the stained glass window, the center one where Christ in purple knocked at a door. She crouched, then tried to scramble across the pew in front, dislodging Mrs. Symon's mink hat. Elizabeth sat still, but Auntie Muriel reached across and jerked at the back of Caroline's coat. The minister frowned from his grape-draped pulpit and Caroline began to scream. Auntie Muriel took hold of her arm, but she broke free and pushed past the line of knees and ran down the aisle. They should have known, right then and there. Something wrong. She said afterwards that the purple was falling on her, but Auntie Muriel told everyone she'd just had an upset stomach. Excitable, they said; little girls often were. She should never have been brought to the main service.

  Auntie Muriel decided it was the minister's fault and spearheaded the drive to get rid of him. They didn't have to listen to that sort of thing. More like a Baptist. Years later he'd been in the newspapers for doing an exorcism on a girl who really had a brain tumor and died anyway. You see? said Auntie Muriel. Crazy as a coot.

  As for Caroline, when seven years later that scream took final shape and she made it totally, calamitously clear what she'd been trying to say, that was something else; that was a judgment. Or a lack of willpower, depending on how Auntie Muriel was feeling that day.

  In the hospital, and afterwards in the institution, Caroline would not talk or even move. She would not eat by herself and she had to be diapered like a baby. She lay on her side with her knees curled up to her chest, eyes closed, hands fisted. Elizabeth sat beside her, breathing the sickly smell of inert flesh. Damn you, Caroline, she whispered. I know you're in there.

  Three years after that, when Caroline was almost seventeen, an attendant was called away while she was in the bathtub. An emergency, they said. They were never supposed to leave patients like Caroline alone in a bathtub; those were the rules. They weren't supposed to put patients like Caroline into bathtubs at all, but someone had decided it would help her to relax, uncurl her; that was what they said at the inquest. So it happened and Caroline slipped down. She drowned rather than making the one small gesture, the turn of the head, that would have saved her life.

  Sometimes Elizabeth has wondered whether Caroline did it on purpose, whether all along, inside that sealed body, she'd been conscious and waiting for the chance. She has wondered why. Sometimes, though, she's merely wondered why she herself has never done the same thing. At these times Caroline is clear, logical, pure; marble in contrast to her own slowly percolating flesh, the gasps of her decaying lungs and spongy, many-fingered heart.

  In the room someone is singing. Not singing but a hum; Elizabeth realizes she's been hearing it for some time. She opens her eyes to locate the sound; the pipes, it must be, vibration of distant water. The wallpaper is too bright, morning-glories, and she knows she should be careful. No openings. She hadn't found those people in the sixties who'd torn their cats apart and jumped out of high-rise windows because they thought they were birds in the least glamorous: she'd found them stupid. Anyone who had ever heard those voices before or seen what they could do would have known what they were saying.

  "Shut up," Elizabeth says. Even this much acknowledgment is bad. She'll concentrate on the text. Criticizing Lin Piao and Confucius before the remains of an ancient slave-owner's war chariots, she reads. The charioteers were buried alive. She peers into the picture, trying to see them, but all she can make out are the skeletons of the horses. Indignant peasants clamor around the grave.

  Her hand holds the book, her body stretches away from her through the water, surrounded by white porcelain. On the ledge, far away, so far she is sure she could never reach them, are the toys the children still insist on floating in their baths, though they should be too old: an orange duck, a red and white boat with a wind-up paddle wheel, a blue penguin. Her breasts, flattened by gravity, her belly. Hourglass figure. Nancy's Little Riddle Book:

  Two bodies have I

  Though both joined in one,

  The stiller I stand

  The quicker I run.

  On the next page over was a riddle about a coffin. Hardly suitable for children, she said that Christmas. Nate bought it, in a little boxed set.

  Her knees jut from the blue water like mountains; clouds of bubble bath floating around them. Bodykins, imported. She bought it for Chris, for both of them, in some sybaritic dream; early, before she found out he didn't like having her look at his body except from half an inch away. He didn't like having her stand back from him, he wanted her to feel him but not see him. I'll get you where you live, he said, much later, much too late. Where does she live?

  Sand runs through her glass body, from her head down to her feet. When it's all gone she'll be dead. Buried alive. Why wait?

  Tuesday, December 7, 1976

  LESJE

  Lesje is out for lunch with Marianne. They've just had a sandwich at Murray's, which is near and cheap; now they're walking over to Yorkville and Cumberland to look in the store windows. It's no longer the place to shop, says Marianne, whom Lesje regards as an authority on such things; too overpriced. Queen Street West is the place now. But Queen Street West is too far away.

  Marianne habitually has lunch with Trish, who's off with the flu. They've asked her along on these expeditions before but usually she says no. She's behind in her work, she says, she'll grab a sandwich downstairs. Surely they don't have much to offer her in addition to the gossip they provide at morning coffee. Marianne openly admits - or is it a joke? - that she went into Biology to meet medical students and marry a doctor. Lesje doesn't approve of such frivolity.

  Now, however, gossip is what she wants. She craves gossip, she wants to know anything Marianne can tell her about Elizabeth and especially about Elizabeth's husband Nate, who has not phoned, written or appeared since he shook hands with her beside the EXIT sign at the dinosaur gallery. She isn't interested in him, really, but she's baffled. She wants to know whether he often does such things, makes such odd approaches. However, she isn't sure how to obtain this information from Marianne without telling her what has happened so far; which she doesn't want to do. But why not? Nothing has happened.

  They stop at the corner of Bay and Yorkville to look at a bunchy blue velvet suit with gold braid trim and a blouse underneath, cuff ruffles and a Peter Pan collar.

  "Too goyish," Marianne says, which is her word for tacky taste. Despite her blue eyes and blond hair and her madrigal name, Marianne is Jewish; what Lesje thinks of as pure Jewish, in contrast to her own hybrid state. Marianne's attitude towards
Lesje is complicated. Sometimes she seems to include her among the Jews; she'd hardly say too goyish in front of her if she thought of her as too goyish herself. Though, as one of Lesje's aunts explained to her, sweetly and maliciously, when she was nine, Lesje isn't really Jewish. She could be classified as truly Jewish only if it was her mother instead of her father. Apparently the gene is passed through the female, like hemophilia.

  At other times, though, Marianne focuses on Lesje's Ukrainian name. It doesn't seem to bother her the way it would probably bother her parents; instead she finds it intriguing, though a little funny.

  "Why should you worry? Ethnic is big these days. Change your last name and you'll get a Multiculturalism grant."

  Lesje smiles at these jokes, but weakly. She's multicultural all right, but not in the way the grant-givers want. And her father's family has already changed its name at least once, though not to get a grant. They did it in the late thirties: who could tell, Hitler might invade, and even if he didn't there were enough anti-Semites in the country already. In those days, the aunts said, you didn't answer the door unless you knew who was knocking. Which is how Lesje has ended up with the unlikely name of Lesje Green; though she has to admit that Lesje Etlin wouldn't have been any more probable. For two years, when she was nine and ten, she told the teachers at school that her name was Alice. Lesje meant Alice, her mother said, and it was a perfectly good name, the name of a famous Ukrainian poet. Whose poems Lesje would never be able to read.

  She changed it back, though, for the following reason. If she were to discover a country which had never been discovered before (and she fully intended to do this sometime), she would of course name it after herself. There already was a Greenland, which wasn't at all the sort of place she had in mind. Greenland was barren, icy, devoid of life, whereas the place Lesje intended to discover would be tropical, rich and crawling with wondrous life forms, all of them either archaic and thought extinct, or totally unknown even in fossil records. She made careful drawings of this land in her scrapbooks and labeled the flora and fauna.