Devotion (7 page)

“There isn't any wife.”

“Because if there is, I'm going to smash Miss Brockman's cello over your head. Because it's covered by insurance. I'll do as much damage as possible.”

They listened. Miss Brockman had gone quiet, but Maggie said, “Just wait.” Soon they did hear Miss Brockman's muffled voice on the telephone. She alternated sobbing with shouting, silence in between, all of which, had they fully taken it in, might've been a sobering human drama, but they concentrated away from it until it was altogether lost. They fell asleep briefly, waking when the telephone rang on Maggie's side of the bed. “It's her,” Maggie said. Five more rings, then the sound of the phone being slammed down. They heard, “Goddammit, Margaret, don't answer, then! What do
I care?” They both moved to the left side of the bed; the sheets were cooler there. They slept again.

 

“I read a little of your book,” David said. It was 7:30 in the morning. He'd already gone out and brought back coffee and cranberry scones. Propping herself against pillows, sheet and blanket pulled up to her neck, Maggie took a sip of coffee, rubbed her front teeth with her forefinger, drank more coffee, took a bite of scone. “Toss me a T-shirt, there, will you?” she said, conscious of having stopped short of adding “darling.” David handed her a blue oversize T-shirt, which Maggie slipped on. “This scone is delicious,” she said. “Thank you. A very nice way to wake up. I can think of only one better way, but it's too late for that, isn't it?”

David sat in the overstuffed chair. Setting the tray aside, Maggie got out of bed, stepped into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her. In a few moments David heard the toilet flush, the sink faucet turned on and off. Maggie emerged, walked in a comically bent-over fashion, holding the T-shirt stretched down to her thighs, and got back into bed. She took another bite of scone. “So, you read a little Anatole France,” she said.
The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard
was on the bedside table.

“Twenty or so pages is all. Both nights we've spent together, I just opened the book to whatever page and started reading.”

“In school, didn't they teach you to start with the first page?”

“Do you remember ‘City of Books'?”

Maggie interrupted with an impressive show of memory: “‘...thereafter made me feel very grateful to Mademoiselle Préfère, who succeeded at last in winning her right to occupy a special corner in the City of Books.'”

“How did you do that?”

“I can recite the odd passage from Proust, too. Some Stendhal. Some Victor Hugo. Maybe five Baudelaire poems in all. But for some reason—maybe I'm a freak of nature—with Anatole France it's like I have a photographic memory. I can't explain it.”

“From what you told me, you read him at university till you were blue in the face. I didn't attend university, by the way. Probably you should know that.”

“Now I know it. I went to McGill. Junior year in Paris, Collège de France, on an exchange program.”

“Why do you read Anatole France in English, then?”

“I speak French pretty well. My reading skills got crummy, and I'm too lazy to work on them. I took half my courses in French. I minored in economics. I guess I thought the combination was ‘sophisticated and European,' or something like that. But as it turned out, when I graduated, it was the economics that was useful right away. I got a job working in the business office at Dalhousie.”

“How long have you been publicity director, then?”

“Five years. I applied the second I saw the job opening. Want the rest of my résumé, David, our second morning together? First of all, observe this hair. You must have noticed I braid it. Almost every day I braid it. That's from childhood. It's obsessive, but it makes me feel
organized.
I definitely get edgy now and then—you haven't seen this yet. Especially with people who complain about their lives. I cannot stand that. Want to see my nasty dismissive grimace?” Without waiting for an answer, she demonstrated it. Outwardly, it made David laugh; inwardly he hoped and prayed she'd never mean it for him. “I'm too thin, so say some people, my father included. I consider myself homely with a few nice features. My hands have received compliments. My feet have not.” Taking this all in, David knew she must've realized by now he found her beautiful. “I'm five feet nine. My nose got broken twice. Ages eight and fourteen, both while ice skating.”

They stayed in the room until 8:45. David went to his flat, showered, changed clothes and picked Maggie up in front of the hotel at 10. John Franco placed her suitcase in the back seat of David's rattletrap Citroën, which he'd purchased from his landlord; it needed repairs but they could wait. Maggie said, “I've got a cup of coffee here for you”—then she said it—“darling.”

“Thank you,” David said. “That was thoughtful.” He fit
the paper cup into the holder near the gearshift. Halfway to Heathrow he said, “I can still get a ticket for Copenhagen. I don't teach for a week.”

“Better to wait, I think.”

The ensemble was at the boarding gate. Maggie led David off to the side, for as much privacy as could be had. “Get everyone else out of your apartment,” she said, “launder the towels and sheets, and I'll consider staying with you there a night when I get back, if I want. If you want. I'm keeping my hotel reservation, though, David. At Durrants.” She boarded the plane. When she found her seat, she thought,
Did I mean, Better to wait and consider all this carefully? Or did I mean, Better to wait until we can't stand waiting? Or all of the above and more, or what?
On the flight she distracted herself with a “to do” list for Copenhagen.

I
N LONDON,
David's apartment was at 813 George Street. Typing there on his old Underwood manual, he composed a letter to Katrine Novak; his new devotion to Maggie was the motivation. He wrote it straight through in one sitting; he knew if he started to rewrite, there might be a hundred drafts; it was of course impossible to get it perfectly right. Still, he and Katrine had a history (quoting Chekhov, she once referred to their relationship as a “skewed love story”). Fact was, David had seldom visited Prague without spending at least one night with her. And while it was true those nights never somehow accumulated into a declaration of fealty, individually they had allowed for passion, the value of which, he and Katrine agreed, should
never be underestimated. With the sound of George Street traffic drifting into the kitchen where he typed, David instructed himself to attempt a philosophical intimacy in the letter rather than nostalgia, otherwise it might suggest the possibility of a return to good things. That would be confusing, false encouragement, a lie. No, David needed to close things off.

 

April 15, 1985

Dear Katrine,

I never thanked you enough for translating the monograph on Josef Sudek—so, thank you, Katrine. That was October of 1982, if I remember right. I need to say good-bye in this letter—because I hope to be married soon. I think, hope, wish to be. The details may be hurtful to you. I don't want that. Suffice it to say I have met someone I feel is the love of my life. I have not known her long. I did not know her during any of our time together in Prague. Though I might sound like I'm trying to absolve myself of guilt, actually I only look forward to the future with her. It would not do you or her justice to not tell you her name—Margaret. There it is, then. I won't be visiting Prague.

While we never, either of us, said “I love you,” deep feelings were there, I think. I know on a number of days deep feelings passed between us. This of course is my summary, not yours. I must tell you this is the truth of things. My heart is closed to you. I would expect the same directness from you.

Often in your presence I felt the tremendous desire to sleep after supper. What was that, I wonder? You wanted to stay up in cafés all night. What an interesting life you lead. That must now sound patronizing. Of course it does. But it's true. Your literary friends, your cafés. Your feverish political discussions. I envy it a lot—also sounds patronizing, I suppose. But nonetheless I mean it. Simply, I'm putting all of our time together in perspective. The one thing that unifies every hour walking in the city, every argument, every photograph you let me take of you, everything, was my gratefulness. That might have a hollow ring. I expect it does. I'm sorry if it does.

How to say it? The past has been replaced by the present with Margaret. To quote Anatole France, “Love has its own velocity.” (I can hear you just now: “You dare inform me about literature, I'll shoot you in the heart.”) Katrine, you are a kind, good, sometimes selfish, mostly generous, very honest, beautiful soul whom I loved as much as I allowed myself to—and let's be honest, as much as you allowed me to. It's never just a matter of doing something “right” or “wrong,” is it? You either live steadily with the deeper emotional contingencies or you don't, and to my mind we didn't. Maybe too much distance and absence, London-Prague, who knows? We each had our cities. We both held back but lovely things still took place, didn't they? Both of us tried each other out. In life you just try people out, isn't that how you put it? I'm grateful you tried me out.

David

 

As soon as he signed his name, David went out to George Street and mailed the letter, in the box situated halfway between his building and Durrants Hotel.

T
HREE-THIRTY A.M.,
August 7, 1986. David is reading
Manuscript of a Country Doctor.
It is seemingly an endless humid night. Still, David feels a slight chill. The sentence he's just read, “We all step into currents of despair,” may have something to do with it. He puts on a moth-eaten, dark blue sweater. Half a peach sits on a plate. The indoor cricket is chirping. The Bach suites for cello are playing.

Not fifty feet from the house a fox—a vixen—loped across the lawn. Head low, tail nearly straight out and wavering, as if batting fox scent toward the swans in order to create panic and confusion in advance of her arrival. The swans came awake. The fox circumvented the pen, driving swans in agitated clusters from one end to the other, whichever was opposite the fox. They stepped and shit right into their wooden water trough. The fox tested the wire mesh with her teeth. In the fog it was as if they were being harangued by a ghost.

Hearing the commotion, David went to the screen door. “What now?” he said.

He kept a rifle in the pantry, a .22 caliber, which had sufficed when a big raccoon somehow got into the pen last winter. He took up the rifle, slid three shells into the chamber and stepped into the yard. He could scarcely make out the pen. David raised the rifle, aimed in the direction of the pond and fired all three rounds. He mainly wanted to scare off the intruder, if in fact there was one. On the third shot he thought he heard a ricochet; possibly he'd hit the metal roof of the bird feeder on its post, and a few seconds later he felt an animal brush past his leg. He looked down to see it was a fox—gone into the fog. Just like that. The fox had actually touched his bare leg, a once-in-a-lifetime thing, he thought, astonished nearly to tears. The swan's Great Enemy had graced David with its stealth and brazen playfulness, the very human being who might have just now killed her.

He felt so grateful, he was tempted, perversely but honestly, to sacrifice a swan to this fox, maybe just loose it in the woods, report it gone missing the next day to William, lying with conviction. Though he'd come to dearly love the
swans, he now loved the fox as well. A thoughtless momentum took hold. Exhilarated, he went into the guesthouse, secured the rifle back in the pantry, grabbed a flashlight and hurried to the main house. He woke William up, saying “William, William, William” close to his ear, shaking him by the shoulder. “Wha-a-at?” William said, a bit like a star-tied goat. “Who the hell's that?”

“It's me, David.” David set the flashlight on the bed. The beam mooned out against the wall. (He remembered his own father, Peter Kozol, was good at doing shadow puppets.) “A fox brushed up against my leg, William. I fired three shots at it. Guess you didn't hear.”

William had scarcely come into full consciousness. David rattled on about the fox. Finally William said, “Know what I thought first thing when you woke me just now? You almost got me killed in London. You fucking idiot. Not to mention everything else.” William turned on his side and went back to sleep.

“Unforgiving son-of-a-bitch,” David said. William didn't budge; maybe he had heard, maybe not.

Should not have woken him like that,
David thought, walking back to the guesthouse.
In the middle of the night like that.
Should not have expected William to celebrate a miraculous incident. Yet who else was there on the estate to tell? For the first time, at least with such inimitable clarity, it occurred to David that, over the past months, he'd tried to invest any
small faith in the possibility not only that Maggie might forgive him—for Katrine Novak, the accident, his dissembling, any or all of it—but that William might consider him part of the family again. Family: he'd addressed this in his notebook.
If only I was back to being part of the Field family
—how inane that read. Yet it was true.
If only William might put in a good word to Maggie for me.
Yet now he was convinced, should he broach the latter subject, William would say, or write: Not till hell freezes over. He would need a second notebook soon.

Stopping a moment on the porch of the guesthouse, David thought,
You fucking idiot.
Or heard the echo of William saying it. It seemed a fitting epitaph: David envisioned it etched on his gravestone. And where would this gravestone be? Not in the Field family plot in Scotland or in the nearby Parrsboro cemetery. No, should he die late that night of an accumulation, slow as an intravenous drip, of poisonous self-pity, corrosive guilt, not to mention desire for his wife, most likely he would be buried in a plot adjacent to one of his parents in Vancouver. He didn't have a Last Will and Testament designating another preference. This little impasse of morbid thought depressed him no end. He felt a crick, a queasy ache in his neck, as if he'd been whiplashed by self-imposed degradation; he felt dumb as a box of rocks, a phrase he'd overheard in the Minas Bakery. Despite being alone, leaning against the screen door's frame, David nonetheless felt embarrassed, realizing that when he'd just now uttered
You fucking idiot,
he'd done so in an imitation of Peter Lorre.