Object of Your Love (17 page)

When they saw me at the apartment door my parents looked guilty, like two kids playing hookey from school. My father stepped behind my mother a little, cowering. It was sometimes a shock to see him alongside her because he was so diminutive, with a bald, grapefruit-sized head, a distracted, nervous and unkempt man meant to be a child all his life.

Behind my parents, sunshine streamed into the living room through a bank of windows. They lived with Art in this new subsidized seniors' building, high up, on the seventeenth floor, a very contemporary apartment full of light, with champagne broadloom, curved white walls, a modern kitchen. Everywhere windows looked out at sky, a wide swath of grassy park, deciduous forest, civilized traffic passing far below on a boulevard curving beside the black river. From this height, the world looked beautiful, kind, good, which suited my parents and Art fine because whenever real life had turned ugly, they'd invented a reality of their own.

I thought it was interesting that they'd waited until I left home before they managed to secure a nice place to live, when all through my childhood they were waking Art and me up in the middle of the night to escape the landlord and move under cover of darkness to yet another small, dim apartment where they'd get into arrears again with the rent because my father went through life smiling idiotically to himself and having nervous breakdowns, though they did not call them that back then.

“Where are you going?” I asked them.

“Oh, just out for a drive,” they said cautiously, their eyes sliding away. I knew that look.

I said, “You're going down to the police station, aren't you?” They stared down at the carpet, uncomfortable, sheepish. “Art's been picked up again, hasn't he?” I said. “More shoplifting.”

“Oh, it was harmless,” my father said quickly, stepping out now where I could see him, enthusiastic as a door-to-door salesman, his face glowing. “It was just a little wallet. Practically of no value. Such a fuss. Those places, Eaton's and those big department stores, they have huge inventories. A wallet here, a lighter there. What is that to them? They're hardly missed. Why do they pick on poor Art?”

“He's just bored with life,” said my mother. “He doesn't mean any harm. It's his only bad habit. Everyone's entitled to a few faults. We can't expect him to be perfect.”

“The boy just wants to experiment.”

I said, “He stopped being a boy a long time ago. Didn't he turn thirty-two last month?”

My father said, “He has a creative streak. He likes to try out different strategies. The methods he comes up with are ingenious.”

I said, “That must be why he keeps getting caught.”

“He's always operated on a small scale. He's never exceeded theft under two hundred. Why don't they go after the big guys?”

“You should leave him in the tank until he learns a lesson,” I told them.

“Oh, that wouldn't be fair.”

“We'd miss him.”

“Art is used to his own bed.”

“I'm going with you,” I said. “I want to speak to him.”

They looked alarmed. “It would be better if you didn't come,” they told me. “Art likes to keep a low profile when he's released.”

“I'll help you deal with the authorities.”

“But we know the ropes. We could bail him out with our eyes closed.”

“It's a wonder they haven't locked the two of you up, as accessories.”

“How is Harlan?” they asked, hoping to distract me. They always wanted to know about Harlan.

I lost my temper then. “What's Harlan got to do with it?”

“We love him. He's a wonderful son-in-law.”

*   *   *

We got in the car and drove downtown, my father in the back seat looking very pleased, grinning senselessly out the window. He was a great watcher of police dramas on television and he enjoyed going down to the station because it brought him in contact with the tangible worlds of crime and law enforcement, which he saw as the two great forces in the universe. I sensed his spirits and my mother's lifting as we proceeded downtown. This was a welcome outing for them. Rescuing Art raised them into another plane of experience, gave them a mission, made them part of something bigger than themselves, a larger-than-life plot.

Their happiness reminded me of the time Art was in the pen for accidentally having a knife in his pocket when he held up a gas station cashier. For two whole years they travelled down to Kingston on the train every Monday to visit him. My mother packed a little picnic lunch for them and they rode cheerfully along in a vacation mood, soothed by the measured swaying of the train, drinking hot tea out of a thermos, eating cucumber sandwiches, enjoying the landscape sliding by the windows, so harmless and serene, talking in optimistic tones about their meeting with Art as though they were visiting a son attending college. My mother said these journeys gave definition and meaning to their lives, they marked off the weeks, made the year pass more rhythmically. Visiting Art got them out of the city and into the open countryside, where my father, looking out the window, counted the silos and watched for groundhogs in the ditch.

My father liked the penitentiary. He described for me its setting, on the shores of Lake Ontario with a pretty view of the marina, as though it were a holiday resort. He was fascinated by the barbed wire strung along the thick outer walls, the armed guards stationed in the corner towers as in a medieval castle, the electronic surveillance system, the big iron doors that rose and fell with a great crash, much like he'd seen in films. In the visiting room, he enjoyed talking into the microphone to Art, who sat on the other side of a glass partition, delivering his lines like a movie actor.

At the police station, my father nearly leapt out of the car before I had a chance to stop, he was so excited to get inside. We entered a large empty lobby, where an officer sitting at a counter instantly recognized my parents.

“Go right on in, Mr. and Mrs. Smirlie,” he said in a friendly way.

They smiled and waved at him. “Thank you, Roddy,” they called. We passed through into a small waiting area where there was a row of hard chairs to sit down on. Soon Art came loping through a door, looking cheerful and relaxed. He had a bushy handlebar moustache and an absurd mane of long seventies hair that made him look like an aging hippie. People noticed him, he stood out, which wasn't smart. You want to blend into the coatracks and the décor if you're fond of shoplifting. But he also had a boyish look—big apple-red cheeks, comical gaps between his teeth, sparkling blue eyes that seemed to endear him to people.

“Mariah, you old bounder!” he boomed when he saw me and he clapped me on the back. Art is very
joie de vivre.
“What are you doing here? You didn't come down just to see little brother, did you? What happened? Did old Harlan finally boot you out?”

“I came to give Mother and Father moral support.”

“We told her not to come,” my father told Art quickly. “We told her we had our own way of doing things. We have our little traditions to observe.”

“So you lifted a wallet,” I said to Art.

“It was a beauty, too,” he confided in a low tone. “Italian kid leather. Hand stitched. Special foldout panel for credit cards. State of the art in billfolds. It was for Dad's birthday.”

“He never forgets my birthday.” My father beamed at him.

I said, “I don't either, but I don't steal what I give you.”

“We don't like to call it stealing,” said my father delicately. “We think of these things as long-term loans.”

By the time the release papers had been signed it was five o'clock and dark outside. We went out and got into the car.

“Don't take us home,” my father told me. “Just drop us off at Luigi's.”

I said, “What for?”

“It's Art's favourite restaurant. We like to take him out somewhere nice after he's been to the station. It cheers him up.”

“He doesn't look too depressed to me.”

“It's one of our small ceremonies.”

“I'll come too, then. I haven't eaten out in a long time.”

“But it's only a table for three,” said my mother hastily. “They're very crowded on Saturday nights. The early-bird special. They could barely squeeze us in.”

“I can't remember the last time you took me to a restaurant.”

“You have your family life. We don't like to disturb you.”

When I stopped the car in front of Luigi's, Art and my father got out of the back seat. It was snowing softly. Up and down the road the streetlights floated in the sky like a string of pale moons. It was the kind of soft evening that makes you think life could be turned back to a gentler time. My mother was about to get out of the car. I reached over and grasped her arm to hold her back. The soft cuff of her ultrasuede coat brushed my wrist.

I said, “What do I have to do to make you and Dad notice me? Rob a bank?” She looked at me blankly. She was not a person I had ever known, she was a woman who had waited until I left home to acquire an equilibrium, a symmetry. Her stockings, boots, coat were all grey, the same colour as her hair. She'd become a monochromatic, seamless woman. There was no place for me to get in. Art was calling. He held the restaurant door open, waiting for her to come.

“You've always been strong,” she said. “You never needed us as much as Art did.”

I said, “If he needs you so much more, why is he the happy one?”

“You have everything a person could want,” she told me. “A husband. A nice home. Two beautiful children. You just don't try very hard to be happy.”

*   *   *

Harlan did not come home that night, which had never happened before. I lay awake wondering where he was. About seven in the morning I heard the front door open and the sounds of him moving around in the rooms below. I put on my housecoat and went downstairs.

“That was truly the mother of all walks, that one you took yesterday!” I said. “Where did you go? Around the world?”

“Something like that,” said Harlan quietly, and there was a final note in his voice that drew me up short. He was always a serious man but that morning his face was filled with a kind of determined sorrow. Then I noticed he held two suitcases, which he'd carried up from the basement.

I said, “What are you doing?” and I felt within myself a strange and unsettling stillness like when the wind suddenly drops. I noticed I'd stopped breathing.

He said, “You know how Tara says she loves the kindergarten teacher? Well, I love her too. I've loved her for over a year.”

“I don't believe you,” I said, though of course I did. It is always the most incredible things that are easiest to believe.

“I'm leaving you. I'm moving in with Irmgard. She is the most profound person I have ever met. I couldn't begin to list for you her qualities.”

“I'm not interested in hearing a list about Irmgard!” I said. “I've already heard enough about her to last me the rest of my life!”

“Can you keep your voice down? The children are sleeping.”

“I know what my children's habits are!”

“Let them rest.”

“Why should I? Why not get them up and tell them what you're about to do to our lives?”

“They stand to benefit from my decision. Contact with Irmgard will enrich them. It's already enriched Tara.”

I followed him upstairs to our bedroom. “All this time,” I said, “you've been talking to me about Irmgard's art projects, Irmgard's nutritious snacks, Irmgard's phonetic methods and it wasn't her study plans you were admiring, you were lusting after her body.” I thought about him longing for Irmgard's legs, the wooden one that came off and the good one that would of necessity be strong and straight to compensate for the bad.

Harlan said, “Irmgard understands what I'm trying to do with my life.”

He opened the suitcases on the bed, where the mattress still held the warmth of my body, on the very spot where I'd lain all night sleepless and worrying that he'd been struck by a car, when in actual fact he was lying in a kindergarten teacher's arms. He pulled open drawers and closets, pressed into his bags the simple wardrobe required for his journey toward Irmgard.

I said, “Have you forgotten why you married me?”

“I don't remember any intelligent reasons.”

“What about my strength? You said you loved my strength.”

“I did think that it was strength you had, but now I understand that it was only anger.”

The children came out of their rooms and stood in the doorway wearing their pyjamas.

I told them, “Your father is leaving me for that kindergarten teacher. He's breaking up our home.”

Franklin said, “Who will drive me to hockey?”

“If Dad's going to live with Irmgard, I'm going with him,” Tara said. “I love Irmgard. I want to be with her.” And she went to her room to pack. Franklin disappeared too.

In Tara's room, I watched her dump the contents of her drawers out on the bed. “I don't know how you can make this choice,” I told her. “I don't know how you can leave your own mother. It was me who made your baby food and changed your diapers and got up with you at night and sat by your bed when you were sick. It was me, not your father, who was too busy wiping the noses of other people's kids.”

Tara said, “That was all a long time ago. I can't even remember any of that stuff. You're different now. We don't get along any more. It's time for us to go our separate directions. You'll see that it's better this way.”

Then I went into Franklin's room and found him stuffing things into the big duffle bag he takes to hockey practice: his goalie's gloves and mask, a pair of pyjamas, his hockey magazines, a toothbrush, hockey posters from his walls.

I said, “Franklin, you're not leaving too.”