What We All Long For Page 10

  Reiner was waiting impatiently for Jackie. He was dressed in his usual gigging black. He was a lean tall man. A tattoo of the planets in their orbits ringed his left forearm. His face, slightly pocked from childhood illnesses, was hard, square-jawed, and roughly handsome. He had his gear near the door. He had a gig in Kitchener tonight. Reiner lived at the back of the store and his band practised in the basement. This all helped with the rent of the storefront, where two women were now browsing through dresses.

  “Hey, babe, glad you’re here …”

  Jackie came through the door. “Hey, hon, sorry”—then seeing the two customers—“Lorraine! Lorraine!—Long time no see. I’ve got just the thing for you, girl.”

  Reiner tried to get her attention again. “Jacks, baby, Claude’s coming with the van …”

  “I know, I know, sweetie, hang a sec. Lorraine, come on over here.” She headed for some racks, dragging the customer called Lorraine behind her. “Missoni, Lorraine, big print, lots of colour, chunky new look, combination bohemian chique—opulent glamour, very northern Italy. You too, honey”—she turned on Lorraine’s friend—“very sixties. Try it on.”

  “Jackie, here’s Claude now …”

  “Yes, sweetie …” Her encouraging gaze still on Lorraine and her friend, Jackie walked over to embrace him, kissing him, running her hand over his cheek. “Bye, honey, have a good gig. See you tomorrow, oh no, Sunday, right?”

  “Yeah, you gotta open tomorrow, Jackie.”

  “Of course, sweetie. What did I tell you, Lorraine? Very south Austria, right? Warm, bold, you, honey. Bye, baby.”

  Reiner loaded the amp into the van at the front door, then came back for his guitar. Jackie felt him lingering and broke off from her sales pitch.

  She embraced Reiner again, saying what he wanted to hear, “I’ll miss you, babe.”

  “I’ll miss you more.” He had been hoping she would have come earlier to spend some time with him. Now he sounded petulant, wounded. She, of course, had forgotten about his gig.

  “Don’t say that, babe.” She touched his roughened face, then took his guitar and walked him to the door. “I’ll stay over Sunday, cool?”

  Reiner was reassured.

  Jackie stood on the sidewalk, watching the van pull away, muttering to herself, “Now that’s what I’m talking about.” With Reiner, she knew who she was, separate and apart, in command of self. With Oku, she was on that train, liquid and jittery and out of control.

  NINE

  A MAN ONCE JUMPED in front of a subway train, embracing his three-year-old son. What it must have felt like to be held like that, simultaneously clasped to a bosom and thrown against a devastating object. Why had he taken the boy with him? Why did people kill their children or their girlfriends or their wives or their parents before killing themselves? Why did they not simply take themselves—was it some spite against another, against the world? How does one maintain spite so late, so close to perhaps the one solitary moment one had?

  The next week Carla saw the funeral on the television news. What a mess he’d caused—now a lot of people had to put things right, had to mourn him, to bury him, to pick out his funeral clothes, carry his coffin, weep for him. Their lives would be altered forever. His wife had to feel guilt over what she might or might not have done, there would be rumours about how she was to blame. Carla would have gone alone, taken only herself and not in so public a way either; she would have simply disappeared, a well-planned disappearance so that no one would know that she was gone in that way but perhaps only gone on a trip, moved to a new city or country. She would have left letters to be mailed over time, arranged phone calls, she would have left a definite route to another life being lived. She would inconvenience no one. That’s how a suicide should be done. It should be a disappearance. A happy disappearance.

  What Carla herself remembered from St. James Town was the odd stirring of the air on the balcony. Something bad had happened and no one would be coming back and this was all a spectacle, it was awful and it was also wonderful, an occasion. She remembered smiling as if it was a prize or an enviable event, though all through it she had walked around with the baby in her arms. No one could pry him loose from her. If they tried, her screeching reached the street twenty-one storeys below, even when her father tried. Especially when he tried. She was not supposed to give the baby to him, she said, her child’s scream piercing him. Through the dense walls, over the balcony, sirening down the railings, through the discarded summer furniture, the thrown-away carpets, the derelict skates, lamps, beer bottles, the forgotten cardboard boxes, the dried pots of annuals, through all the dreams apartment dwellers store as garbage on their balconies until the next summer. Her screams travelled and fell to the knob of grass at the front of the building, radiating out to wherever Angie might be. She would not stop screaming until she was left alone with her brother in her arms. Then her screaming subsided, and in a minute, the threat forgotten, she was thrilled again at the occasion of having someone die in her own house.

  She was five then, twenty-three now. And she could still hear a telephone ringing, which she could not answer because she was holding the baby for Angie; the front door slam, then open—the baby was hers. Her mother had given him to her. Had passed the bundle of him gurgling to her. She had been singing along with the radio, “Trains and boats and planes …” She had a pencil in one hand and a last mouthful of doughnut in the other and she was conducting an invisible choir when her mother out on the balcony had said, “Carla, stop that noise, sweetie, and come and hold the baby.”

  Her mother, Angie, always had her hold the baby when she potted plants on the balcony. She potted impatiens and marigolds and morning glories. She tried a grapevine once and after a few years there were tiny sour green grapes. Carla loved those grapes. She loved to wear the same clothes as her mother. She especially loved a purple velvet skirt. Angie had the skirt. Carla had a dress of the same velvet. Angie sewed a green bear at the front.

  “Now put the pencil down, sweetie, don’t get it in his eye. Okay, take him inside now. Careful, careful. Hold him carefully.”

  Carla’s stepmother, Nadine, works at Mt. Sinai Hospital, but she wouldn’t be in the line of nurses outside grabbing a smoke; she didn’t smoke. Carla’s mother, Angie, smoked though. She was in Carla’s mind yesterday and today, but she wished that she remembered her mother more clearly. Then she might know what to do about Jamal.

  Over the years, despite her efforts to hold on to the memory, her mother faded and faded until all Carla had left was the certainty that Angie had existed and the violent loyalty she owed her. There was a small photograph of Angie that she had been allowed to keep as a child. A woman in blue jeans and a checkered shirt with dark shoulder-length hair. The photographer had caught her with her mouth about to say something—a sentence unfinished—her eyes were happy, laughing. She was in a park, a dog and a man and a tree were in the far background. Her skin was pale, and there was a mole on her left cheekbone. Carla had memorized her face.

  Jamal, of course, could not remember their mother. Because he was still a baby when she died and it had been Carla’s job to tell him about Angie. Her small recollections weren’t always enough to support the fierce passion she expected of him in this respect. She had even taken him to where they used to live, showing him the high-rise apartment building on Wellesley, pointing to the twenty-first floor, the railing from which she and Angie had blown bubbles into the air; the balcony where they sunbathed in the summers. Angie had bought her a pair of sunglasses just like her own, and they rubbed suntan lotion on each other, giggling, and lay on towels listening to the radio, to Three Dog Night and John Denver and Credence Clearwater Revival. If she could give Jamal a memory, she thought—something like a lovely secret—he could hold it and it could perhaps make him strong when he needed it. But Carla’s own font of memories was fading, and those that she had given to Jamal were only second-hand and worn out, if not fabricated.

  Carla loved these
Mondays the way she loved snowstorms. The way these two things stopped the world. A city hemmed in by snow was a beautiful thing to her. Cars buried in the streets, people bewildered as they should be, aimless and directionless as they really are. Snowstorms stopped the pretence of order and civilization. The blistering winds whipped words right out of people’s mouths, they made all predictions and plans hopeless. She would abandon all warnings from Tuyen and the weathermen on twenty radio and television stations and launch out into the city in a blizzard. Identifying the direction of the wind, she would turn and turn in the blizzard and be lost, walk with it, walk against it, driving her feet through the thick gathering wall of it. Nothing like a snowstorm to calm a city and make things safe and quiet.

  But there was no snowstorm today, just that same numbness about her brother. Which is why she found herself standing in front of the big apartment building where they used to live when Angie was alive. It had long become a kind of shrine for her.

  Carla was thankful that she’d got a job as a courier. It gave her more time to think, and she could ignore the world where you had to fit, where you had to play some game she didn’t understand and just wasn’t up to. She probably could have if she had wanted to—that’s what her friends always said.

  She was not phenotypically black either. Only on careful consideration could one tell. She looked more like her mother. She always found it odd and interesting that most black people recognized her anyway. They were more attuned to the gradations of race than whites. Whites generally thought she was Spanish or Middle Eastern. So to disappear into this white world would have been possible. But it would have been a betrayal of her mother’s choices as she saw them. Her mother was white, her father was black. Her mother must have made her choice for a good reason: good or bad she had crossed a border. Carla instinctively understood. And it must have meant something profound to her mother. It must have taken some doing and it must have cost something, because when she died no one claimed them, Carla and Jamal, no one except her father. And that reluctantly. Angie had been dead to her family since the day she started up with Carla’s father, Derek.

  Though Carla had thought many times of running away from living with her father and stepmother, she never did—there was always Jamal to keep her. He had run to Yonge Street when he was fourteen. Their father had eventually found him there, standing in a doorway at the Gerrard Street intersection with two other boys. He was high on glue. That was after Carla and Nadine had pleaded with him to go get Jamal. Well, Carla didn’t plead, she hung over the house like an unanswered question. Derek, her father, could feel her brooding and her anger—he was oddly alert to it even when she was a child—so he went to get Jamal. He had been two weeks on the street and was ready to come home. He sullenly followed his father to the car, came home, and slept for a week.

  Jamal swore to Carla that he wouldn’t do it again. She came to his room and reminded him that it was just the two of them together and alone in the world, and he promised without understanding. She promised him that when the time came, soon, she said, in a year or so, they would move out together. They sat in his room, dreaming of this. About the stereo he’d have and the job she would get after college and how he could finish high school while she worked and how they would be free from their father and this house. He promised the way anyone promises after a rough experience. But it was only the first time he ran away, not the last.

  Carla had approached the buildings from the north, from the vista of the viaduct. Angie used to like that spot. Even in the winter and especially that last winter, she would bundle Carla and the baby up and take them to that spot. Walking up past the Castle Frank subway to the bridge looking over the Don Valley. Angie would stand there, staring and telling them how lovely it was and that it reminded her of where she was born, except for the bridge, except for the traffic, and except for the winter. She promised that in the summer she would take them down the trails under the bridge. She hadn’t done it that summer after all, Carla thought, though there were summers when she had taken Carla alone. That was before Jamal was born. The two of them, Carla and Angie, would set off on a Sunday morning, finding their way under the bridge, idling along the paths, listening to birds and the snuffed noise of the highway high above them. But that summer, the summer when Jamal was still a baby, was the summer when Carla’s job was to hold on to him, tight, while Angie stepped off the balcony. Angie hadn’t even waited through the whole spring.

  They had argued furiously. Carla had covered her ears to block the noise of the fight between her father and her mother. Her father was screaming, “Don’t you ever, ever come to my house and disturb my family again. This is the last time you’ll ever see me, you bitch.”

  “You’re not going to get away with this. You liar, you liar, you fucking liar.” Angie’s voice was thick with disgust and love. Then there was only the sound of bodies against walls and fists against flesh; a dresser tumbling down in their bedroom.

  “You’re crazy, you’re fucking crazy, let me go.” Her father dragging Angie toward the door, Angie hanging on to her father as he tried to reach the front door. When he got to the door he succeeded in ripping her fingers from his throat and shoving her hard toward the kitchen.

  “Fucking bitch, you want to ruin my life, eh? Leave me the fuck alone.”

  Angie was whimpering as he slammed the door, then with a kind of roar she grabbed a pot from the sink, flung the door of the apartment open, and sped down the hallway, screaming, “You fucking liar, you shit, I’ll hurt you, you see, you see if I don’t.” The pot ricocheted off the elevator doors, and Angie stood there emptying her lungs with the sound of an enraged wordless scream. Back in the apartment Carla patted a mewling Jamal. He had been awakened by the noise and was fretting. Carla patted him, saying, “Sleep, sleep. Sleep, sleep.”

  Angie came in from the hallway, went to the bedroom, and collected Derek’s clothes. She took them to the balcony and threw them over—his gloves, his pants, and his underwear. Then she cleaned the apartment, turning the stereo up to its loudest, scrubbing her hands under the kitchen tap, her face slack-jawed, streaming with tears.

  Carla told Jamal this story once, what she recalled, in an attempt to make him understand why he should love someone he never knew and why she was steadfast in her love for Angie. Jamal only understood it in that it deepened his sense of why his father did not love him. Even as the story came out of her mouth, Carla knew this was how he would take it, not as a sedative against their father but as a confirmation of his fears. More and more she found herself unable to console him or to call on anything she actually knew for certain that would help him.

  “Maybe she was a bitch, Carla.” He had said the most dreadful thing. She had slapped his already wounded face and strode off. She could not forgive him. Yet she did in the end because he was the best thing that she had of Angie’s.

  782 Wellesley Street, apartment 2116. Toronto M6H 5E7. Phone number 962–8741 (when the bill was paid). When Carla was four, Angie had taught her the address through nightly repetition. And her last name—Chiarelli. The building looked slightly shabby now. Worn out. So were her feelings, standing in front of it. Carla sat on the small grassy spot out front. She was suddenly exhausted, from the long walk and from the ride yesterday, from the whole thing. Did it happen the way she remembered it, did it happen at all?

  All the way here she had felt childish, as if she was going to tell Angie something. But, of course, Angie Chiarelli wasn’t here and this place was just a nondescript, shabby apartment building, a new set of people going in and out of it; its occupants must have changed several times in the last eighteen years. Whoever lived in apartment 2116 was oblivious to Angie or to her. This was not a home where memories were cultivated, it was an anonymous stack of concrete and glass. There were no signs of Angie’s presence, no old wardrobe, old door buzzer, old dress. The grapevine had been ripped down from the balcony of 2116, the towel and the suntan lotion and the dark glasses Angie bough
t her were not strewn haphazardly on the floor up there waiting for her. She had overused these memories, wrung everything from them. She could hold them on one page of a notebook. The only way she could make them last was to spool them in a loop running over and over in her brain. The same sentences arranged in different ways. She knew she had probably made up some incidents along the way until they were indistinguishable from the real ones—extensions of them. Had she said, “If Angie were here, this or that could have happened,” and then made it so, melting what should have been with what was?

  Sometimes she thought that events could not possibly have happened the way she remembered. How could she recall with such clarity things Angie said, things her father said? Wasn’t she too young to understand? But she did remember. She would swear by it. Love can make you remember. And what she had left, what she could be sure about, was an utter love. When Angie had said it was time for her to go to school, she had spent hours drawing a picture of herself. She gave it to Angie her first morning of kindergarten, saying, “I drew you a picture so you won’t forget my face when I’m gone.” What she was sure about was that this love was steady and deep enough to create itself over and over again.

  But 782 Wellesley had become less and less cooperative in that love. Today it stood there indifferent and inhabited by other lives, other worries, other dramas. The building would not register these any more than it had Angie’s. 782 Wellesley was built especially for disavowal—it was incapable of nuance or change or attitude. It was innocent. Carla felt a stifling lethargy. Wasn’t she just thinking about love? “Draw me a picture of you so I won’t forget your face, Mom.” Angie had laughed, kissing her. That feature of love, the one that recalled something unadulterated, enjoyable, she no longer remembered it. The flush of pleasure never came on its own. Always the invasive clasp of a wilfulness, as if she loved Angie despite things, not for them. She hated her father because she loved Angie, she loved Jamal because she loved Angie, she loved her friends because she loved Angie, she was a bicycle courier because she loved Angie, she hated policemen and ambulances and bank tellers because she loved Angie. Loving Angie was a gate, and at every moment she made decisions based on that love, if the gate swung open or closed. She kept from loving because she loved Angie. She collected nothing like furniture or books because she loved Angie and things would clutter the space between her present self and the self that Angie loved. Carla needed a clear empty path to Angie as a living being. She appeared calm on the outside. She had a cool surface. But the battle to sort out what she could and couldn’t love was furious in her. The loop of experiences with Angie needed more and more space in her brain and the invention that maintaining an image of her mother required took all her will and focus. The things that she could touch that reminded her of Angie were few. This building was one. Today it yielded little that could nourish her purpose.