The Beggar Maid (21 page)

Patrick could not speak when she told him. He had no lecture prepared. He didn’t speak for a long time but followed her around the house while she kept justifying herself, complaining. It was as if he wanted her to go on talking, though he couldn’t credit what she was saying, because it would be much worse if she stopped.

She didn’t tell him the whole truth. She said that she had “had an affair” with Clifford, and by the telling gave herself a dim secondhand sort of comfort, which was pierced, presently, but not really destroyed, by Patrick’s look and silence. It seemed ill-timed, unfair of him, to show such a bare face, such an inappropriate undigestible chunk of grief.

Then the phone rang, and she thought it would be Clifford, experiencing a change of heart. It was not Clifford, it was a man she had met at Jocelyn’s party. He said he was directing a radio play, and he needed a country girl. He remembered her accent.

Not Clifford.

She would rather not think of any of this. She prefers to see through metal window-frames of dripping cedars and salmonberry bushes and the proliferating mortal greenery of the rain forest some small views of lost daily life. Anna’s yellow slicker. The smoke from Jocelyn’s foul fire.

D
o you want to see the junk I’ve been buying?” said Jocelyn, and took Rose upstairs. She showed her an embroidered skirt and a deepred
satin blouse. A daffodil-colored silk pajama suit. A long shapeless rough-woven dress from Ireland.

“I’m spending a fortune. What I would once have thought was a fortune. It took me so long. It took us both so long, just to be able to spend money. We could not bring ourselves to do it. We despised people who had color television. And you know something—color television is great! We sit around now and say, what would we like? Maybe one of those little toaster-ovens for the cottage? Maybe I’d like a hair blower? All those things everybody else has known about for years but we thought we were too good for. You know what we are, we say to each other? We’re Consumers! And it’s Okay!

“And not just paintings and records and books. We always knew they were okay. Color TV! Hair dryers! Waffle irons!”

“Remote-control birdcages!” Rose cried cheerfully.

“That’s the idea.”

“Heated towels.”

“Heated towel racks, dummy! They’re lovely.”

“Electric carving knives, electric toothbrushes, electric toothpicks.”

“Some of those things are not as bad as they sound. Really they’re not.”

A
nother time when Rose came down Jocelyn and Clifford had a party. When everyone had gone home the three of them, Jocelyn and Clifford and Rose, sat around on the living-room floor, all fairly drunk, and very comfortable. The party had gone well. Rose was feeling a remote and wistful lust; a memory lust, maybe. Jocelyn said she didn’t want to go to bed.

“What can we do?” said Rose. “We shouldn’t drink anymore.”

“We could make love,” Clifford said.

Jocelyn and Rose said, “Really?” at exactly the same time. Then they linked their little fingers and said, “Smoke goes up the chimney.”

Following which, Clifford removed their clothes. They didn’t shiver, it was warm in front of the fire. Clifford kept switching his attention nicely from one to the other. He got out of his own clothes as well. Rose felt curious, disbelieving, hardly willing, slightly aroused and, at some level she was too sluggish to reach for, appalled and sad. Though Clifford paid preliminary homage to them both, she was the one he finally made love to, rather quickly on the nubbly hooked rug.
Jocelyn seemed to hover above them making comforting noises of assent.

The next morning Rose had to go out before Jocelyn and Clifford were awake. She had to go downtown on the subway. She found she was looking at men with that speculative hunger, that cold and hurtful need, which for a while she had been free of. She began to get very angry. She was angry at Clifford and Jocelyn. She felt that they had made a fool of her, cheated her, shown her a glaring lack, that otherwise she would not have been aware of. She resolved never to see them again and to write them a letter in which she would comment on their selfishness, obtuseness, and moral degeneracy. By the time she had the letter written to her own satisfaction, in her head, she was back in the country again and had calmed down. She decided not to write it. Sometime later she decided to go on being friends with Clifford and Jocelyn, because she needed such friends occasionally, at that stage of her life.

Providence

R
ose had a dream about Anna. This was after she had gone away and left Anna behind. She dreamed she met Anna walking up Gonzales Hill. She knew she was coming from school. She went up to speak to her but Anna walked past not speaking. No wonder. She was covered with clay that seemed to have leaves or branches in it, so that the effect was of dead garlands. Decoration; ruination. And the clay or mud was not dry, it was still dripping off her, so that she looked crude and sad, a botched heavy-headed idol.

“Do you want to come with me, do you want to stay with Daddy?” Rose had said to her, but Anna had refused to answer, saying instead, “I don’t want you to go.” Rose had got a job at a radio station in a town in the Kootenay mountains.

Anna was lying in the four-poster bed where Patrick and Rose used to sleep, where Patrick now slept alone. Rose slept in the den.

Anna would go to sleep in that bed, then Patrick would carry her to her own bed. Neither Patrick nor Rose knew when this stopped being occasional, and became essential. Everything in the house was out of kilter. Rose was packing her trunk. She did it in the daytime when Patrick and Anna were not around. She and Patrick spent the evenings in different parts of the house. Once she went into the dining room and found him putting fresh Scotch tape on the snapshots in the album. She was angry at him for doing this. She saw a snapshot of herself, pushing Anna on a swing in the park; herself smirking in a bikini; true lies.

“It wasn’t any better then,” she said. “Not really.” She meant that she had always been planning, at the back of her mind, to do what she was doing now. Even on her wedding day she had known this time would come, and that if it didn’t she might as well be dead. The betrayal was hers.

“I know that,” said Patrick angrily.

But of course it had been better, because she hadn’t started to try to make the break come, she had forgotten for long stretches that it would have to come. Even to say she had been planning to break, had started to break, was wrong, because she had done nothing deliberately, nothing at all intelligently, it had happened as painfully and ruinously as possible with all sorts of shilly-shallying and reconciling and berating, and right now she felt as if she was walking a swinging bridge and could only keep her eyes on the slats ahead, never look down or around.

“Which do you want?” she said softly to Anna. Instead of answering, Anna called out for Patrick. When he came she sat up and pulled them both down on the bed, one on each side of her. She held on to them, and began to sob and shake. A violently dramatic child, sometimes, a bare blade.

“You don’t have to,” she said. “You don’t have fights anymore.”

Patrick looked across at Rose without accusation. His customary look for years, even when they were making love, had been accusing, but he felt such pain on Anna’s account that all accusation was wiped out. Rose had to get up and go out, leaving him to comfort Anna, because she was afraid a great, deceptive rush of feeling for him was on the way.

It was true, they did not have fights anymore. She had scars on her wrists and her body, which she had made (not quite in the most dangerous places) with a razor blade. Once in the kitchen of this house Patrick had tried to choke her. Once she had run outside and knelt in her nightgown, tearing up handfuls of grass. Yet for Anna this bloody fabric her parents had made, of mistakes and mismatches, that anybody could see ought to be torn up and thrown away, was still the true web of life, of father and mother, of beginning and shelter. What fraud, thought Rose, what fraud for everybody. We come from unions which don’t have in them anything like what we think we deserve.

She wrote to Tom, to tell him what she was going to do. Tom was a teacher at the University of Calgary. Rose was a little bit in love with him (so she said to friends who knew about the affair:
a little bit in love
). She had met him here a year ago—he was the brother of a woman she sometimes acted with in radio plays—and since then she had stayed with him once in Victoria. They wrote long letters to each other. He was a courtly man, a historian, he wrote witty and delicately amorous letters. She had been a little afraid that when she announced that she was leaving Patrick, Tom would write less often, or more guardedly, in case she might be hoping for too much from him.
Getting ideas.
But he did not, he was not so vulgar or so cowardly; he trusted her.

She said to her friends that leaving Patrick had nothing to do with Tom and that she would probably not see Tom any more often than she had before. She believed that, but she had chosen between the job in the mountain town and one on Vancouver Island because she liked the idea of being closer to Calgary.

In the morning Anna was cheerful, she said it was all right. She said she wanted to stay. She wanted to stay in her school, with her friends. She turned halfway down the walk to wave and shriek at her parents.

“Have a happy divorce!”

R
ose had thought that once she got out of Patrick’s house she would live in a bare room, some place stained and shabby. She would not care, she would not bother making a setting for herself, she disliked all that. The apartment which she found—the upstairs of a brown brick house halfway up the mountainside—was stained and shabby, but she immediately set to work to fix it up. The red-and-gold wallpaper (these places, she was to discover, were often tricked out with someone’s idea of elegant wallpaper) had been hastily put on, and was ripping and curling away from the baseboard. She bought some paste and pasted it down. She bought hanging plants and coaxed them not to die. She put up amusing posters in the bathroom. She paid insulting prices for an Indian bedspread, baskets and pottery and painted mugs, in the only shop in town where such things were to be found. She painted the kitchen blue and white, trying to get the colors of willow-pattern china. The landlord promised to pay for the paint but didn’t. She bought blue candles, some incense, a great bunch of dried gold leaves
and grass. What she had, when all this was finished, was a place which belonged quite recognizably to a woman, living alone, probably no longer young, who was connected, or hoped to be connected, with a college or the arts. Just as the house she had lived in before, Patrick’s house, belonged recognizably to a successful business or professional man with inherited money and standards.

The town in the mountains seemed remote from everything. But Rose liked it, partly because of that. When you come back to living in a town after having lived in cities you have the idea that everything is comprehensible and easy there, almost as if some people have got together and said, “Let’s play Town.” You think that nobody could die there.

Tom wrote that he must come to see her. In October (she had hardly expected it would be so soon) there was an opportunity, a conference in Vancouver. He planned to leave the conference a day early, and to pretend to have taken an extra day there, so that he could have two days free. But he phoned from Vancouver that he could not come. He had an infected tooth, he was in bad pain, he was to have emergency dental surgery on the very day he had planned to spend with Rose. So he was to get the extra day after all, he said, did she think it was a judgment on him? He said he was taking a Calvinistic view of things, and was groggy with pain and pills.

Rose’s friend Dorothy asked did she believe him? It had not occurred to Rose not to.

“I don’t think he’d do that,” she said, and Dorothy said quite cheerfully, even negligently, “Oh, they’ll do anything.”

Dorothy was the only other woman at the station; she did a homemakers’ program twice a week, and went around giving talks to women’s groups; she was much in demand as mistress of ceremonies at prize-giving dinners for young people’s organizations; that sort of thing. She and Rose had struck up a friendship based mostly on their more-or-less single condition and their venturesome natures. Dorothy had a lover in Seattle, and she did not trust him.

“They’ll do anything,” Dorothy said. They were having coffee in the Hole-in-One, a little coffee-and-doughnut shop next to the radio station. Dorothy began telling Rose a story about an affair she had had with the owner of the station who was an old man now and spent most of his time in California. He had given her a necklace for Christmas
that he said was jade. He said he had bought it in Vancouver. She went to have the clasp fixed and asked proudly how much the necklace was worth. She was told it was not jade at all, the jeweler explained how to tell, holding it up to the light. A few days later the owner’s wife came into the office showing off an identical necklace; she too had been told the jade story. While Dorothy was telling her this, Rose was looking at Dorothy’s ash-blonde wig, which was glossy and luxuriant and not for a moment believable, and her face, whose chipped and battered look the wig and her turquoise eye shadow emphasized. In a city she would have looked whorish; here people thought she was outlandish, but glamorous, a representative of some legendary fashionable world.

“That was the last time I trusted a man,” Dorothy said. “At the same time as me he was laying a girl who worked in here—married girl, a waitress—and his
grandchildren’s baby-sitter.
How do you like that?”

At Christmas Rose went back to Patrick’s house. She had not seen Tom yet, but he had sent her a fringed, embroidered, dark blue shawl, bought during a conference holiday in Mexico, in early December, to which he had taken his wife (after all he had promised her, Rose said to Dorothy). Anna had stretched out in three months. She loved to suck her stomach in and stick her ribs out, looking like a child of famine. She was high-spirited, acrobatic, full of antics and riddles. Walking to the store with her mother—for Rose was again doing the shopping, the cooking, sometimes was desperate with fear that her job and her apartment and Tom did not exist outside of her imagination—she said, “I always forget when I’m at school.”