A Beauty Page 7

  “Liberty Hall, for example,” she went on, “would not have been built if everybody in the district had not pitched in.”

  “It was in their interest, that’s why,” he said. “And you can bet your bottom dollar somebody made some cash on the side, in the Liberty Hall deal and in every other instance you could name. Sweetheart, people are born selfish and they die selfish and in between they want what’s best for themselves.”

  “If people have what they need, they don’t have to take from others.”

  “Don’t you believe it. Say, is your old man a Commie? That’s Commie stuff you’re spouting. You can get yourself arrested for that. Don’t be talking like that in public, or we’ll have the Mounties tailing us.” He patted her knee. “Stick with me, kid,” he said. He smiled to himself. She’d liked that shopping, yesterday. She was happy stepping out of the shop wearing her new high-heeled dancing shoes and her new togs. Funny dress to pick, though; brown, and it practically covered up all her assets. He’d teased her a bit about it and told her he’d have to help her out when they shopped again in the city.

  “What’s your old man like?” she asked.

  “Oh, hell, I don’t want to talk about him.” He scowled down the length of the hood, at the chrome ornament at the end, a greyhound pawing the air. The greyhound was supposed to look fast, he supposed, but what it really looked was eager, and it wasn’t ever a good idea to look too eager, especially with a girl. He put his foot down and the roadster responded right away. He wondered what she’d think if she knew his father had bought the car for him, had sent him on this road trip, a present for passing his final exams, getting his degree – or that was the official version. It was only coincidental that his father had planned to go away, himself, for the summer, and had taken his secretary with him.

  There was a fair amount of prejudice against the rich, Bill knew, and especially when a lot more people than usual were poor. He didn’t buy that gab in the picture show about values and what was important in life, but he wasn’t going to advertise his situation, either. On the other hand, he was feeling a bit guilty over Peg – but he had thought Elena would be impressed. Every time he thought about trying to impress her, he found himself shaking his head. He couldn’t figure her out. But he knew the thing to do was not let on you were ruffled, let it look like you were amused, put nonchalance on your face, like Clark Gable did. Whistle a little tune. He wondered if he might go into the newspaper business. He didn’t have a clue what to do when he got back home in the fall, and he was getting good at telling lies.

  A yellow wagon popped into his mind. He’d seen a Rawleigh salesman with a yellow wagon a few miles out of Rosseton and it came to him he could use the man for his father. “Now, there was a salesman for you,” he said, liking the sound of that past tense, making it seem, even to himself, that his father was dead. No one he had to think about. No one who had any influence over him. “He sold Rawleigh, hawked Rawleigh products in a boxed-in, horse-drawn wagon. Painted yellow, for God’s sake. Yellow, so the farmwives could see it coming and get excited.” She was listening, her head tilted attentively. He knew she could see it, too, parked on the country road. “That damn yellow box. That’s all I can think of when I think of him. The poor bugger. Bright yellow, colour of a kid’s crayon. Yup, every couple years he’d slap on another coat, keep it looking fresh. Spent his life with his head in that damn yellow box. No kidding. I’ve seen him lean into it, looking for some tincture of something or other, and damn-near disappear inside it, tip right in so his feet went up in the air. Legs sticking out like some kind of frog being tortured.”

  “Tortured?”

  Whoa, he’d got carried away. “Kids. You know they do that,” he explained. “I don’t know how I got started on all this.” And he thought: Truer words were never spoken.

  “It’s not how you want to be, like him,” she said.

  “It’s not how I am, sweetheart.”

  “That’s true, Bill,” she said.

  “My head’s in no box. It’s not in the clouds, either. No sir, my head’s square on these two shoulders.” She was looking at him as if he was bleeding or something. “Christ,” he said, “I need a drink. You go along, there’s a goddamn town every seven goddamn miles, and when you need one, where is it?”

  “Is your father dead?” she asked.

  It was kind of shocking to have her say it like that, right out. “Ah, yeah,” he said.

  She said, “My father is also dead.”

  “I’m sorry.” He was going to say more, he was going to say both of them having dead fathers gave them something in common, but he was glad he hadn’t when she said, “No need to apologize. There is nothing at all to be sorry about.” She sounded more cross about it than sad and since he was already mad at himself for going on and on about a yellow wagon he’d seen once on a road in the middle of nowhere, he let the subject drop.

  She was quiet after that, too. She sat up straight and leaned forward, watching the road ahead. Forward-looking. Sometimes he didn’t know if she was the most frustrating person he’d ever met, or if there was something wrong with him that he couldn’t make it easy between them. He was used to easiness; it came naturally to him to find the right thing to say, the right attitude to fit a person and a situation. He hardly ever encountered an awkwardness that needed smoothing over – until with her.

  It was a few miles later that she said, almost as if she was thinking aloud, “You know, I thought that movie was about what kind of man makes a good husband, but now I wonder if it was also about who makes a good father.”

  “Oh, who cares?” Bill said.

  She looked at him as if she was going to say, “You do.” But she didn’t.

  Virginia Valley had two hotels. Bill drove past them both so they could read their signs. The Balmoral advertised itself as “A Home Away from Home, Home Cooking, We Employ White Help Only.”

  “It means the other place is run by Chinamen,” Bill said. “And it won’t have a bar. They don’t license chinks to sell liquor.”

  “Well, we can stay there and you can go to this one for a drink. I can’t go into the bar with you anyway. And I’ve never seen a Chinaman.”

  He grinned at her. “You’re gonna see a whole lot you’ve never seen before this trip is over,” he told her.

  The Windsor Hotel was cleaner than the norm. Somebody had laid wet cloths along all the windowsills to keep out the dust that was constantly blowing ever since spring thaw, even down in the valley. Bill moseyed over to the Balmoral for a few drinks and got his flask filled while Elena washed up, and then they had supper in the hotel restaurant, where she was able to observe two Chinamen taking orders, filling coffee cups, and distributing heaping platters of greasy food. She was disappointed neither of them had pigtails, which somewhere along the way she’d been told they would. And she was surprised they were dressed like other people. They talked like Chinamen, though. As Bill pointed out, they murdered the English language, if you could call their lingo English at all.

  They had what he called a good time in the restaurant, but when they got back to the room, she sat down on the side of the bed, looking like some kind of orphan alone in the world. At first that annoyed Bill, and then it occurred to him that her name was almost the same as the girl in the picture show. He went up to her and ruffled her hair. “Ellie,” he said, softly. “I just realized you have the same name, sort of. And you’re running away, too, aren’t you?”

  She got under the covers and pulled them up to her chin. He crawled in beside her. “What you and I need to do is find us a beach somewhere,” he said. “Yeah, we need ourselves an island.” When she didn’t answer, he poked her. “Hey? Don’t you have any romance in you?”

  She sat up. “Sock her once in a while. Whether she asks for it or not. That’s what the father says Ellie’s husband ought to do to straighten her out. And it’s what Peter says he will do when they’re married.”

  “They’re kidding!”

&
nbsp; “Kidding?”

  “Don’t you know kidding when you hear it?”

  “I guess not,” she said.

  If that wasn’t enough to flummox him, after a good minute of staring at the wall, all of a sudden she told him he was a good person. At first he laughed, but then he felt sad, so sad, in fact, he had to clear his throat and ask her something that had popped into his head the same time she was saying it. It was if her father had beaten her. He had to ask.

  She seemed surprised. “No, no,” she said. “He would never do that.”

  “He was a good person, too?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  After a while he said it was hard for him to believe they’d watched the same show. “It’s a comedy, for God’s sake,” he said. “It’s about a guy looking for the right kind of girl for him, and a girl finding the right kind of guy for her. That’s all it’s about.” He said she made too much of it. “It’s like you went to the restaurant downstairs in this burg, and asked for filet mignon. And all you’re gonna get is fee and chee.”

  “What is fee and chee, anyway?” she asked.

  “Fish and chips.”

  “Fish and chips?”

  “Fee and chee!” He got her smiling, then. “Missie likee fee and chee? Eh? Eh? What Missie likee tonight, eh?” She laughed out loud. It was as if she forgot everything they’d been talking about. It was so gratifying, and led to such surprisingly satisfying love-making, that he fell asleep with a smile on his face.

  She’d meant it when she said Bill was a good person, and not just because of his good-natured smile and the way his eyes smiled, too – that everything’s-okay-here-isn’t-it-sweetheart brightening of colour in his nice blue eyes that made him appealing to women, that made it easy for any woman to like him – and not just because of that bit of swagger that had its own attraction. Already she felt comfortable with him. She liked the way he touched her and how pleased he was with everything she would do for him. She liked the way she could see inside him to the person he really was.

  A few hours after she fell asleep, she sat right up. She couldn’t see into the black void that surrounded her, and she didn’t have a clue where she was. She’d been dreaming; she’d thought she’d heard her father’s voice calling her, first as if he stood at the door to the room, and then as if he were standing right over the bed. She’d opened her eyes and he wasn’t there. There had only been his voice, getting nearer and nearer. Saying her name. He’d sounded urgent. “Elena, Elena. Wake up, girl.” He was trying to warn her about some disaster that was going to befall her.

  She remembered she was in a hotel and peered about as her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. She still couldn’t see far into the room, but the door seemed to be closed. She couldn’t hear anything but Bill’s even breathing. She thought of fire, maybe that was the disaster, but she couldn’t smell smoke. They’d fallen asleep with the window closed and the air was stuffy. She thought about getting up, opening it. She imagined the fresh air in her face, but fear crept up from her toes. She lay back down, carefully, as if to move too fast would alert some lurking creature or fate, thinking maybe she did hear something down the hall.

  In his back room, Jerry Wong was mopping up the glass of water he’d knocked over. Water was running off his bedside table and streaming over the slanted floorboards, and he saw himself, a ridiculous figure, chasing it. Waddling like a duck on his haunches. He could hardly keep up to it, sop it up with his pillowcase. It was stupid that he had a pillow, anyway, when he didn’t use it, that he put a glass of water by his bed and seldom drank it, that he did a thousand things he thought he should do in order to seem to himself like somebody he wasn’t. And then he ended up standing outside himself, watching himself – there was no one else to watch or care.

  He’d flung his arm out in his sleep. His body had tried to imitate his mind. He’d been dreaming about his wife. How is business? his wife asked in each of her letters. He hadn’t seen her for over ten years. They wrote to one another every month and on their birthdays they sent photos of themselves. He looked younger in his than he really did, and he expected it was the same with her, although in fact she didn’t look young at all anymore. And didn’t bother smiling, as she had in the first ones she’d mailed to him, or signing them on the back, as she had before, with her full name.

  His son would soon be ten. His only son. Jerry had never seen him except in pictures. And he’d thought he was so smart, coming to Canada, his great escape. He’d been back just once, to get his wife pregnant. There had been no money to return a second time and she wasn’t allowed into the country. He could speak English as well as an Englishman, and what good did it do him?

  On the other hand, he was spared her constant presence. It had been an arranged marriage; there had never been any question of love between them, and now there was only the business, which she had never seen. And the son he’d never seen. But he had a son, that was the main thing, a fine youngster, studious and obedient, his wife assured him, and so he appeared in his photographs and in the short, careful letters Jerry received.

  A big gust rattled his windowpane, but he didn’t go to look outside. It was always windy, always dusty and dry and hot. He would see nothing out his window he hadn’t seen a thousand times before. He hung the wet pillowcase over the railing in the hallway and went downstairs to his office and took out his accounts book. Industry was the only cure for middle-of-the-night self-ridicule. He would pore over the numbers until he fell asleep in his chair, and when his neighbour’s rooster crowed, he’d jump up as if the night had never been, and make coffee and rouse his brother-in-law, and they would start cooking and cleaning and joking with one another and the customers.

  The smell of fresh-baked bread woke Elena up in the morning. Bill had already risen and was getting washed. The room was lit so brilliantly she thought the sun must be sitting on the windowsill. Cool air wafted over the bed. She sat up, let the sheet fall off. “What’s this?” she said, examining the bruises on her stomach. It looked as if she’d been punched. It looked like a thunderstorm brewing black and blue and brown across her navel.

  “The steering wheel, sweetie. The other day?”

  She didn’t have to ask about the ache low down inside her pelvis; she knew where that came from. She wondered what you did with a man when your monthlies started. She was glad she’d thought to pack her rag pads the night she took off. It was unusual for her to feel grateful for those things, or to Maria Gustafson for giving them to her, four of them, neatly sewn of flannelette rags, to tie around you and protect you on those days, to rinse and wring nightly (shuddering) and hang up to dry.

  And here was Bill, whistling like the first bird of spring, as if he’d just invented morning. Soaping himself in front of the dresser, watching himself in its mirror. Lovingly, he caressed his sturdy body with the soapy cloth, flinging suds around him. Iridescent bits flew off him in the sunlight, and when he got to that thing of his, well, lovingly only half-described it. He drew on it until it stood up like a separate being with the word thrust on its mind. The heaviness in her pelvis increased and then sharpened as she watched his hand follow its upward slant. He closed his eyes, turned his face up to the sun. “Baby, come here,” he whispered.

  After breakfast the coffee crowd arrived. One of the reasons Jerry Wong didn’t have money to return to China was that he insisted on donating from their small profits to local initiatives. His brother-in-law understood; their generosity brought the coffee crowd to their restaurant and that was just about the margin that kept them in business. It was more than that, though, for Jerry; it was part of his idea of who he should be, the place he should establish for himself in the community for the time his son could join him.

  Most mornings he didn’t stop to think. You had to keep the cups full. You had to say something about the weather and at least one other thing that would make them laugh. But that morning – maybe it was the after-effect of spilling his glass of water in the
night – he found himself a couple of times staring at nothing, with the coffee pot in limbo between where he was and wherever he was headed. He found himself wondering where his wife was at that precise moment, what she was doing. Sleeping, perhaps, on the other side of the world. It was best to picture her sleeping, his son, too, in a safe bed. Best not to concern himself with troubled times. When were there not troubled times in China? He tried to remember the stroll they’d taken one day through the gardens near her house, tried to picture his wife under the round red lanterns that hung from the trees, tried to believe his life would be different if he never saw her again.

  On one of these time outs, he stood at the window, unseeing, and then realized he was looking at a magnificent automobile. He set the coffee pot down and went outside just as the car pulled away. It was the handsome young couple. He hadn’t seen them arrive, and now they were driving down the hill to the ferry. He pulled off his apron and hung it on the fence post down at the sidewalk. He followed the huge gold roadster down to the water, and when he got there, he stood chatting with the town blacksmith, who was loitering there, too, watching while the car drove onto the barge and it chugged off onto the river. The day was warm, the sun like hands on his shoulders, like a wife’s hands would be, a kind of benediction as she stood behind him, approving all he did. But it wouldn’t be his wife’s hands. She expected so much of him and she didn’t understand goodwill. Every month she wanted an accounting. She wanted to know why he was poor in such a rich country.

  “Can we get out of the car?” she asked.

  “We sure can,” he said. He waited for her to come around to his side of the barge, and noticed her bag behind the seat. This morning it was bulging. He’d filled it with gifts back in Charlesville, that’s why.