Dropped Threads 2: More of What We Aren't Told Read online

  By eleven o’clock, I was fairly convinced that this was going to be a night when he didn’t come home until very late, or very early, as the case might be. I had passed the time since the phone call in a number of ways. I was reading The Diviners by Margaret Laurence, and that had distracted me for a while. I was also working on a quilt that my grandmother had left unfinished, adding by hand appliquéd images from her life—the red brick church, the farmhouse, one of her dogs—to what was otherwise a standard Dresden plate design. That night I began to work on an apple tree: a pedestal of dark brown surmounted by a green cloud-like shape decorated with bright red apples. My grandmother had left the quilt unfinished when she moved into a small privately run nursing home, when she could no longer cope with the house. I would be leaving both the quilt and The Diviners unfinished for quite another reason. Both the book and the sewing would bring the long summer night, and my waiting through it, back to my memory so vividly that I would simply not be able to face either the apple tree or Morag’s tortuous development as a writer.

  At three o’clock in the morning, I found myself standing by the window in the storeroom, looking out into the dark night toward the end of the village where, from that vantage point, the by-now very intermittent lights of the cars on the main road could be seen. I was playing a game that I had played in the past when I waited for him at night in places where I had a view of the road. The sixth set of lights would be his, I would guess, and then I would begin counting. At this hour, the counting would take a long time, as often thirty minutes would pass before anything at all would appear. Then, quite unexpectedly, two or three vehicles would move by in rapid succession. These were most often trucks making mysterious journeys to towns and villages farther north. In the stillness of the night, I could hear them gearing down as they descended the hill near where some of my relatives lived. Each time I heard the sixth vehicle gear down, I would experience extreme disappointment, as if my young husband knew he was supposed to be the sixth set of lights and had decided deliberately to disappoint me. How could you let me down like this? I remember whispering into the window glass. Then I would remember the phone call, how I hadn’t been able to hear what he was saying, and the twitch of fear would return.

  The storeroom was filled with fascinating things. As well as the dead hired man’s trunk, there were boxes of old Christmas cards, birth and death announcements, letters of condolence, some hatboxes filled with hats my grandmother had worn at one time or another to the same red brick church I had sewn onto her unfinished quilt. There were several other cardboard boxes that held such items as embroidered christening gowns and crocheted baby bonnets and one long, flat box that contained my grandmother’s wedding gown, still beautiful but slightly yellowed by time. Often during my childhood, I had dressed up in this gown while the relatives had discussed important, adult things in the kitchen below. There I sat, gorgeously attired, sorting through the many buttons and buckles contained in an old cookie tin, hoping to find a diamond ring nobody else knew about. Of course this never happened, though at the bottom of the tin I once discovered a rhinestone clasp that my grandmother said was used to decorate a shoe.

  I thought about these things now and then as I waited for another set of lights. I also thought about the mud pies I made years before in the woodshed with an earthen floor that was directly below the storeroom. Eventually I decided that I should lie down, that if I went to sleep I might be wakened by the sound of his footsteps on the stairs.

  I did lie down, but I didn’t go to sleep. The only thing that changed was that instead of waiting for car lights I was now waiting for footsteps. The heat was still intense. It was four-thirty in the morning.

  It had never occurred to me that I would be a twenty-four-year-old widow, though by the time the policeman arrived at first light I knew exactly what he was going to say to me. The bedroom in which we slept—my grandmother and grandfather’s bedroom—was a long, low room under the eaves and had two small windows placed in opposite walls, almost at floor level. Because the house was situated on the bend and was slightly elevated, we could see the road moving off in two directions from these windows. I remember lying on my grandmother’s bed, still in my green shorts and tank top, watching with a pounding heart as the police car slowly approached the house. When it passed by the driveway without turning in, I experienced a huge wave of relief. Short-lived, however, because I could see through the opposite window that the police car had stopped and was executing a U-turn halfway down the village street. Then, very slowly, it whispered back toward me, making the approach to my grandmother’s front door.

  What followed were months during which much of what I said and did would be immediately forgotten by me, never to be retrieved. What I do remember, however, are the dreams, many of which provided me with unwanted explanations concerning where he had gone, why he had vanished from my life. Sometimes in these dreams he would pass me by on the street without acknowledging my presence, often arm in arm with another young woman. Sometimes he would just come home, drive up to my grandmother’s door, greet me joyfully, then explain earnestly that he couldn’t stay, that if I were unwilling to go with him our relationship would be over. Once I dreamed that everyone but I knew that he had joined a commune in Manitoba, that the funeral, the grief, the mourning had all been a sham, a conspiracy to convince me he was dead when all he wanted to do was escape from me. The other thing I remember is that I had these dreams during a period when I was experiencing both grief and guilt. Each night, alone in bed, I couldn’t seem to prevent myself from reliving every single argument we had had, and every unkind, now unforgivable, word I had said in the midst of them. Some of the arguments had taken place on those few occasions when he had come home late after a disappointment. I knew that on that particular summer night he would have been driving a little too fast, that his blood alcohol count would have been too high. He might have stayed in Toronto overnight with a friend. But he would remember those arguments, and he would be trying to get back quickly, to me.

  I spent several weeks answering cards and letters of condolence. Many of the people who wrote to me expressed the opinion, in as tactful a way as possible, that I was young and would, as a consequence, soon recover from my loss and go on to live a full and meaningful life. In fact, this would turn out to be true. But at the time I had been horrified by the suggestion; I believed that this abstract concept of an unknown life of joy would require that I forget about him and our life together as soon as possible. In order to prevent this prediction from coming true, I began a series of lengthy projects in a variety of different scrapbooks, one for each place we had lived. I drew the floor plans of our various flats and apartments and my grandmother’s house. I listed all his sweaters, jeans, shirts, even the socks that I had come to know so well because of physical closeness and because I was the one who had most often done the laundry. I drew every piece of furniture we had owned. I wrote lengthy descriptions of the views from all the windows (omitting the view from the storeroom). I catalogued favourite songs, books, poems and works of art. I pasted our few photographs onto these pages. I remembered and sketched significant objects from the early days of our relationship: his knapsack, his guitar case and guitar, his Zippo lighter, his cowboy boots. I jealously guarded his artwork, all the prints and paintings and drawings he had done at the Ontario College of Art and in Nova Scotia. One of these in particular can still bring me close to tears: a beautifully rendered realistic pencil drawing—exact size—of his left hand.

  It was my grandmother who was able to give me words of comfort. Though she was nearing the end of her own life and was often unfocused, she was always coherent on the subject of loss. She told me that after my grandfather died, she had awakened in the same bedroom where I had seen the police car approach, then withdraw, then turn and make the journey back. She hadn’t been quite awake, she said, and before she opened her eyes she became aware of a birdsong. “Charlie,” she had whispered, “what kind of bird is that?”
Charlie, my grandfather, who had been beside her in the bed for all those decades, had not answered, of course, but the bird went on singing. “The bird went on singing,” she told me, “it just went on singing and singing.” I believed I knew what she meant.

  My Life

  as a Shadow

  Alison Wearing

  It began so innocently. I was working as a waitress and sketching with words in spare hours of the day. One afternoon, in one of those moments that seems suspended from reality, so fated is the feeling, a book fell before my eyes, and I devoured it in one delectable crunch. I had never read anything that had delighted me more, so decided to write to the author and tell him. Except for a large exclamation mark that took up most of the page, I don’t remember much of what I wrote. I never expected a response, and when one did arrive, I found it a bit clunky and forgettable.

  About a year later, perched at the restaurant’s counter, flipping through the newspaper at the end of my shift, I noticed that the author was in town that night to promote his new book. I shimmied my arms out of my shirt, turned it around so all the coffee stains were at the back and jogged twenty-six blocks to the theatre. I had no idea what to expect. But he was captivating, utterly mesmerizing. He did the reading from memory, with the exception of the last line, which he read, slowly, deliberately, gracefully. I rode the streetcar home, his new book in my hands, replaying the evening over and over in my mind.

  And wrote another letter.

  This time, I waited, painfully, for a response. And the response was painful. He offered standard greetings, thanked me for my letter, twirled a few witty phrases and then dropped the casual news that he was about to fly off to the other side of the world to meet up with a woman he’d known only eight days. It was all terribly romantic. Like something, say, from a book. I was crestfallen, but amused. I sent a rambunctious letter to his contact address and went on with my life.

  At the invitation of a friend with a spare room in his belfry, I moved to Tuscany and continued writing. The day I arrived in Italy, I learned that a Canadian literary magazine had accepted one of my stories. My first published story! It was an auspicious beginning.

  Several months into my stay, the bulk of the novel I had been bashing out on my friend’s manual typewriter blew out the window of my Room-with-a-View on a gust of wind that smelled of rosemary. I raced down three flights of stone steps and began gathering up the fluttering pages from the cobblestones, but I never found them all. It didn’t really matter. The novel was unimaginably bad, and I burned every retrieved page that night in the fireplace.

  I needed new direction. I decided to leave glorious, hopelessly romantic Italy and travel to war-torn Yugoslavia. I contacted friends in Serbia, gathered visas and supplies, found a magazine interested in my ideas. A few days before my departure, after a day of battling consulate officials in Florence, I trudged wearily up the steps of the belfry to the sight of an airmail envelope waiting on the mat outside my door. I still remember the dazed—fateful—feeling as I read and reread the author’s name on the back of the envelope.

  The body of the letter was unimportant. Lots of jokey, well-written nonsense. It was the last paragraph, the bit about things not working out with the woman of eight days, that made me dance around the room. I spent most of the evening sitting in a thick, round chair crafting a response. Cheshire cat grin on my face. Chianti within arm’s reach on the stone hearth beside me.

  The letters continued back and forth over several more months and countries, until eventually we were in the same city at the same time and we arranged to meet. I think I can speak for both of us when I say there was a moment, when we finally sat across the table from each other, of enraptured anticlimax. You could practically hear the thud. He, I believe, was expecting me to be the very image of a Botticelli painting, blond tresses trailing behind me as I leapt, nymph-like, from the Tuscan landscape. Instead, I was haggard and sleep-deprived, having just rolled off a plane from Serbia. I believe I was expecting him to be the narrator of his stories: relaxed, easygoing, open-minded. Instead, he was jittery and judgmental, clearly nervous.

  But we managed. And a week later flew off to an island dotted with pastel-coloured houses to begin what felt like our honeymoon.

  Terribly, terribly romantic. Like something, say, from a book.

  It never occurred to me that this was anything but the purest and most triumphant of love stories. I never imagined that I might have fallen in love with the Author (or the Narrator), not the man; or that he might have become entranced with the Fan (or the Devotion), not the woman. And that this might become a problem. No, the Problem.

  Shortly after our “honeymoon,” we moved in together. We were both writing (he was in the middle of a novel; I was hoping to write a long tale about my travels in Yugoslavia), but we were also newly in love, and so spent countless days doing what amounted to lying around smiling at each other.

  I must be able to find solitude in the midst of all this togetherness. Otherwise I fear I will forget the sound of my own voice, I wrote to myself, prophetically, during those lazy days of bliss.

  Within a few months, my money (and the euphoria) began to run out. I managed to cobble together my Yugoslav tale—“the essential difference between us,” Michael explained after reading a draft, “is that you write metafiction and I create art”—then I found a job. I planned to write in the evenings and on weekends.

  It is eerie to read my journals from that time. I feel as if I am peeking over the shoulder of someone else’s life, reading another’s words, so foreign is the voice. When I pore over the pages, the hundreds and hundreds of pages, I can see the pieces of myself left at various points along the way. Like a child in a movie theatre, I am often tempted to yell, “Look out!” when I see the dangers approaching.

  The summer came and went and I built not one word. When he is writing, I am teaching. When we meet up at the end of our workdays, we simply enjoy each other, and I scarcely notice I’m not writing.

  He didn’t want me to leave the room tonight while he worked, begged me to “please just sit here with me while I do this.” I never thought I would find myself agreeing to such a thing, but I am incapable of letting him down when he makes such a request. He is so appreciative when I provide simple support—and how difficult is it? I found something to read, lay on the bed and held him from across the room as he worked.

  Not the least bit coincidentally, but utterly unconsciously, I began reading and rereading The Journals of Sylvia Plath. I told myself it was the descriptiveness and complexity of her writing that intrigued me, but this is one of the passages I copied into my own journal: “It is as if I were sucked into a tempting but disastrous whirlpool…. We are amazingly compatible. But I must be myself—make myself and not let myself be made by him.” I also found myself thumbing through biographies of painters—Picasso, Hopper—and scrutinizing the pages that talked of their wives. Any mention of these women as selfless, endlessly supportive, forever catering to their creative, all-consuming husbands disgusted and angered me.

  My descent, and no doubt that of every other shadow artist before me, occurred in gradual, imperceptible steps. I didn’t flop to the ground one afternoon; rather, I allowed myself, slowly, insidiously, to become secondary, dependent, hollow.

  Last night he asked me to help him with his grant application. We went through his reviews, his files upon files of adoring reviews, and I sat there wondering who in the world I am trying to fool. I do not have that writing style, those ideas, that depth. I am the fool, for believing I could write. I have spent these last months listening to him spin words into majesty. If I sit in silence and concentrate, I can remember a time when my life was built of my own words. Now, most of the time, the only voice I hear is his.

  The difficult part was that we had so much damn fun together. Michael had an extraordinary sense of humour and such an infectious laugh that it was impossible not to join him when he started. He’d normally have me laughing the mom
ent I woke up: pretending to be a Polish cleaning woman trying to change the sheets while I attempted to sleep in; making up a song, in French, with vague choreography, about the red suede shoes Stalin used to wear to breakfast. His antics were always surprising and always delightful, and even though my standard response was to groan and beg him to leave me alone!, I loved it. We went to films, concerts and plays together, then discussed them animatedly all the way home and into the evening. The discussion would lead to lovemaking and midnight snacks in the kitchen by candlelight. We’d talk and talk and talk; tell wild, unbelievable stories; plan long, exotic journeys until we were both covered in maps. On nice days, we’d take long walks and end up in a gallery somewhere, wandering and staring, touching fingertips and sharing the silence.