Shelby (31 page)

“Cute kids,” I said.

“A handful,” she said with a warm smile.

“I'm going to be an uncle.”

“Congratulations.”

I looked at the boxes in her arms. “Christmas presents?”

“Yes.”

“They enjoy it?” I asked.

“He's getting the hang of it,” she said, pointing to the older one.

“Christmas
truly
is a time for children, isn't it?” I asked. She nodded. “For the record,” I added, “I'm opposed to Nintendo, television and board games based on the occult.”

She smiled.

“As presents, I mean.” There was a pause. “Cute kids,” I said again. The bus came. I helped them on. We said our goodbyes.

Over the next hour and a half, it was evident that the baby news had instilled within me a newfound ability to shop. Although Dad doesn't golf, I bought him a golf glove and golf balls. For Derek and Kristine I purchased a snugly—$49.99 at the Bay. Ward's Music had a sale on so I picked up for Eric a
Pink Floyd: The Wall
stained songbook for $1.99 and an equally cheap kazoo. And for Mom I bought a few secondhand paperbacks. The
coup de finis
, though, was picking up a card, wrapping paper and the framed and enlarged childhood photograph of Lucy—its beauty shaking my foundation.

At work I was swamped by books in circulation, my only respite being ten minutes of casual conversation with Hans the custodian about the joys of motherhood and marriage. I did most of the talking. Upon asking his thoughts, he replied, staring straight ahead: “Vell, it is alvays quvestinabull vhat is best for ze soul, yah?”

Despite having arranged to go to Lucy's right after work, I first returned to Eric's apartment to pack my Christmas presents and take them to Lucy's so as not to have to stop off at the apartment again before travelling home for Christmas. The place for no obvious reason wreaked of fish. Eric, as expected, wasn't home. Evidently he'd left for his two-day Californian holiday. I left his presents on his bed.

Arriving at Lucy's, she told me Eric had phoned in the morning to tell me he cancelled the California trip due to a lack of funds and that if I wanted a lift back to Revelstoke I should call him by noon. I was too late—not that I'd have called anyway. After all, I had a blue canvas hockey bag full of presents on my shoulder, Lucy an arm's length away, the spirit of childhood in my heart and, finally, the delightful awareness of my love and me sharing one more day together before the bus trip home. Standing in the doorway, she didn't invite me in, instead grinning as would a child with a secret aching to be told.

“May I come in?”

“Of course.”

I put the hockey bag on the floor, kicked off my shoes, walked into the front room and sat down in the big green chair. Lucy sat across from me, on the couch, and continued to stare, her grin intact.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Fine.” Her smile widened.

“I'd like to say it was awfully fulfilling looking after you.”

“Thanks,” she said. Maybe a minute passed.

“Lucy?”

“Yeah?”

“What are you looking at?”

“Who's looking?”

“You are.”

“Can't I look?”

“You can
look
.”

“You sound paranoid.”

“No.”

Lucy stood up from the couch and exited towards the bathroom humming a few bars from “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”—nary a week after she'd expressed her ambivalence towards the season.

“You can't sing that and walk out!” I yelled.

“La la la.”

“What's going on?” I followed her into the bathroom. “If I guess will you tell me?”

“Tell you what?” she said, breaking off a piece of dental floss.

“It's love, isn't it? You want to tell me you love me.”

“I hardly know you,” she said, flossing.

“Ha ha.”

“No more questions or I'll kill you.”

We spent the evening in a state of quiet euphoria: talking, reading, smiling.

“Get up!”

Heart pounding, I sprang forward to see Lucy roll off the bed and run out of the room, clothed only in a bra, socks and her gauzed hand. I turned to the clock. It was five past six in the morning.

“Close your eyes!” she yelled from outside the room. I closed them. “Are they closed?”

“What are you doing?”

“Close them.”

“They're closed.”

I heard her steps get closer. “Okay,” she said, “open them.”

And there before me was an unusual looking black case on the bed about the dimensions of a bassoon.

“Open it,” she said with an enthusiasm reminiscent of when she lent me the money to reimburse my parents months earlier.

Unclicking the buckles, I was shocked to find inside a saxophone—judging by the case and a few dents an old one, but nonetheless in excellent condition, lined in pinky-purple shag carpet, its body like buffed gold. I gingerly touched a couple of the keys. “My God.”

“You like it?”

“For me?”

“No kidding.”

“
God
. I adore it!” Inside was a note:

Merry Christmas

Thanks. A sexy instrument for a sexy guy
.

Love Lucy xoxox
.

“Me?”

“Of course you,” she said with a laugh.

I glanced up at her. “I'm not sexy.”

“Can
I
pick presents?” she asked proudly. Sighing, my nose whistled. It made no difference. There was a poem, handwritten at the bottom of the note.

If your house catch on fire, Lord, and there ain't no water around, Throw your trunk out the window, and let the shack burn down
.

“I'm stunned,” I said.

Lucy beamed. I reached over and hugged her. “Now you can jam with your brother,” she said doing something disco-like.

“Derek?”

“He plays the clarinet, doesn't he?”

“How did you know that?”

“You told me about it months ago—when we first met.”

I didn't recall. I glanced back at the card. “Lucy, I … don't know what to say. What does this poem mean?”

Lucy tilted her head to read it. “I saw it in a book of Spirituals I was flipping through in the store where I bought the sax. It sounded cool. The card was there …” She shrugged her shoulders.

I gave the saxophone a squeaky blow. “Three months,” I said.

Lucy smiled.

“I'm not kidding,” I said. “Music is very mathematical and I have a gift for math. Speaking of that, I have a gift for you, too.”

“Really?”

“Yes. It's not much. It's … I'll get it.” I trotted out of the bedroom and into the hallway by the front door, and removed from the hockey bag the wrapped photograph of Lucy. My heart momentarily fluttered. I walked back into the room and offered it to her gently.

She unveiled it face down, flipped it over and stared.

“Well?”

She looked up, her face without expression. “Where did you get this?”

“I borrowed it from your … photo album.”

She looked for a few more seconds. “Oh yeah,” she said, her face lightening, “that's where I've seen it.”

“What does that mean?”

“I found it on the top shelf of the bedroom closet when I moved in here,” she said.

“
What
?”

Lucy shrugged. “Homely little thing, isn't she?”

“It's not you?”

Lucy laughed and glanced back at the photograph. “Of course it's not me,” she said, “look at her.” Lucy turned the photograph my way. She was still laughing but it seemed forced.

“I don't know,” I said, “I think there's a resemblance.”

“Really?”

“Of
course
. I thought it
was
you! Why do you think I had it enlarged?”

“Sorry,” she said with a smile. The saxophone glittered at my side.

“I thought it …” I shook my head. “Give it to me and I'll smash it.”

“
No
. I'll put it on my wall.”

“What for? How stupid.”

“It's great.”

“I feel like
swearing
!”

“I love it, Shel, really,” she said, “it's a beautiful photograph.” She leaned her face towards me, offering a smile and a kiss. We collapsed backwards on the bed and she caressed my ribby back with her bandaged hand. I was soon soothed.

The morning was shrouded in the possibility of lovemaking. We had tea and toast in bed while outside the white sky sent forth snowflakes the size of cotton balls. Floating down, they'd land in the alley and then,
poof
, be gone. Lucy sat watching them for a good hour while I lay on the front room floor perusing Sartre's
Anti-Semite and Jew
—Lucy's book and surprisingly readable (albeit an unusual choice for Christmas Eve). Every quarter hour or so I'd peek into the bedroom and watch from behind Lucy gazing out the window. Though curious, I didn't ask her what thoughts she held. I had a feeling they weren't for sharing.

Sometime into the early afternoon the snow stopped and the sun shone white through the clouds like a bright reflection off a silver tray. Lucy and I bundled up and trotted to the Safeway at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Vine. The trees and bushes were covered in a pristine inch of snow. The roads were clear. The air was cold on my face but my body felt wonderfully warm. Without provocation, Lucy slipped her hand in my jacket pocket and for the first time, I knew without question we were lovers.

“Come to Revelstoke for Christmas,” I blurted. “We'd have such larks.”

“Larks?”

“
Fun
. George Bernard Shaw. We'll go tobogganing.”

“Yippee!”

“You'll come?”

“No way.”

“Don't be afraid.”

“I'm not.”

“Come or I'll kill myself,” I said. She laughed.

XXI

Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only!

—
Walt Whitman

Groceries were irrelevant with the hand of the woman I loved in my pocket. We wandered aimlessly and contentedly around the store for a half hour or so and ended up with a box of Japanese oranges and two purple candles. Once home, we walked directly into the front room. Lucy lit one of the candles, put it on the coffee table and poured the oranges all over the floor.

“
Din
nuh is served,” she said. I ate four of them and I think Lucy ate two. We split a bottle of Muscadet, swig for swig. Towards the end of the meal we simultaneously lay down on the carpet and rolled oranges wrapped in green paper back and forth in the faded light; sometimes the paper fell off, sometimes an orange rolled under the couch, sometimes they rolled out of reach. Gorging the last one, I remembered the Christmas card I had bought for Lucy was still in the hockey bag I'd brought from home. Cheeks bulging, I offered her a one finger “Just be a second” gesture. Lucy rolled an orange beneath her hand and gave me a thumbs up. Entering the hallway, candlelight flickered, landing upon the wall like the shadows of a thousand ballerinas. And in that light I read:

The valley spirit never dies;

It is the woman, primal mother
.

Her gateway is the root of heaven and earth
.

It is like a veil barely seen
.

Use it; it will never fail
.

I started to tremble. That poem had moved me the first time I saw it, too, seven or eight months earlier saying goodbye to a Lucy I did not yet know, a migrained Lucy, a Lucy I did not yet love—or did I? I'd always reacted to it since, but suddenly the feeling was all-consuming. I turned back to the front room.

“It's time,” I said.

Still rolling the orange, Lucy looked up. The candle flickered her shadow on the wall. She smiled. “I'm playing with an orange,” she said.

I lay down and softly kissed the tops of her feet and then her ankles before standing up and undressing in front of her, my boney frame now only mildly embarrassing.

“Look at you,” she said.

I walked into the bedroom and lay on the bed. The mattress, at first cold on my back, warmed quickly.

Lucy came in with a candle flickering in her hand. She placed it on the bedside table. Her footsteps were soft upon the hardwood floor as she undressed naked to her bra. I stood up and undid it, gently holding each breast, one at a time, kissing her nipples. And when we were on the bed I kissed her everywhere else I'd never kissed her before.

If forced abstinence had taught me anything, it was that lovemaking was not about paying ten dollars at a toll booth on the way up the Coqhihalla Highway. Indeed, Lucy's foreplay comment from months earlier had rung a true chord—and for the first time I knew it was not about connecting dots. It was about not knowing. I knew nothing. It was about timelessness. I took off my watch. It was about faith in the mystery. We had no destination. There was no map. There was no manual. I was lost, words from the
Song of Songs
playing over and over in my head,
Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires, Do not arouse or awaken …
Had I done that? What was right for my spirit? Was this the tantra?
Let go
, I said over and over,
I mean hold on, I mean let go …

Every time I'd begin to speed up, Lucy would put her hands around me and slow me down. Barely moving, I could hear our sweat breaking forth just as primordial sludge must have done, splitting in two, deep in our ancestry; separate, together, separate, together, the rhythm meditative, spreading outwards from the center, beyond the bed, into the night and farther. I moaned with pleasure, pulling my body upwards, gazing at Lucy. Pulling me in tight, we began to speed up. This time, Lucy didn't slow us down. Collapsing forward, alive with exhaustion, our bodies inseparable and indecipherable, the only movement came outwards from the tips of my soul, pumping, yearning, flailing …