A Jest of God Read online

  “Hi.”

  Nick is leaning against the door frame, looking up at the neon sign, to which Hector Jonas has recently added a refinement. It now goes off and on, automatically, like the delphinium blinking of eyes.

  “Hello. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.”

  “That’s okay. You’re looking very nice.”

  “Oh. Thank you.” My black linen, sleeveless, with the gold pin on the shoulder. But now I wonder if it isn’t too dressy. Only a movie, after all. Maybe I should have worn my blue and white cotton. Too late now. Will he think it looks as though I don’t know what to wear? Or that I’m giving some kind of importance to this evening? That’s not so. It isn’t so at all. If I speak quite coolly, he’ll realize it.

  “I see what you mean about the sign,” Nick says as we get into his car.

  “I hate living here.” This is the last thing in the world I ever intended to say. He’ll say Why don’t you move, then? Or think what a peculiar outburst when we hardly know each other.

  “I don’t blame you,” he says offhandedly. “Damn this car. Something’s the matter with the ignition.”

  Finally it starts.

  “I’ve got to trade this old wreck in,” he says, “before it gets any worse. It’s depreciating God-knows how many dollars every hour – every second, probably.”

  “It doesn’t seem like an old wreck to me. But I don’t know anything about cars.”

  “Neither do I. That’s why I always get rooked on them. Never buy another secondhand car, I tell myself. But I go on doing it. I’m more like my old man than I think, I guess.”

  I don’t see his father at all any more. The milk is delivered by someone else, a hired man, these days. But when I was a child – I’d forgotten until this moment – Stacey and I used to cadge rides on Nestor Kazlik’s sleigh in the winter, a big wagon-sleigh drawn by two horses, and all the milk bottles were carefully covered with a tarpaulin so they wouldn’t freeze and burst. We would grab hold of the back and be pulled along dizzyingly, as though skiing or flying, until our arms nearly broke and we dropped off on to the hard rutted snow of the road. He used to be a big man, a great bear of a man, with a moustache thick as an untrimmed hedge.

  “How do you mean?”

  “He still won’t have a car. He says he has the milk truck and that’s plenty. Anything more would be an indecent expenditure. It took about ten years of persuasion before he would even get the truck instead of a wagon. He still can’t believe that he isn’t on the verge of penury and hasn’t been for quite a few years. You talk cars to him and he starts muttering proverbs or something – you know? Extolling thrift. You got to learn to be careful, he tells me, or you won’t have enough money to pay for your own funeral. I don’t care about my own funeral, I tell him. What a disgrace, he says, a teacher and they can throw him in a field and let the crows eat his eyes for all he cares – what kind of man is this?”

  “He doesn’t mean it, though.”

  “He means it,” Nick shrugs, “and also doesn’t mean it. He never feels any need to be consistent. He took my mom to Banff last summer on a holiday, and that’s what they went in, this little van-type truck with Kazlik’s Dairy Manawaka Manitoba painted on the side. He made Jago get out the old wagon to deliver the milk, so he could take the truck. My mom wanted to go by bus, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He actually took her to the Banff Springs Hotel. My God, what a crazy man he is. My mother wrote me about it. He’s not in the market for even a secondhand car, but all at once he decides he’s a prince. The best, he tells her. For once, the best. My mom is horrified, but she can’t bear to tell him, because he’s enjoying himself so much. So they go bowling in, with Kazlik’s Dairy truck, among all the herd of Cadillacs and Lincolns. My mom creeps around amid the fashion plates like some kind of stout silent tortoise, you know? Massive retirement into the shell. But not him. Hell, no. The first night, he disappears. Before dinner. At ten he still hasn’t turned up. There is nothing to eat in the room, not even a chocolate bar. My mother is sitting there in the middle of the Banff Springs Hotel, starving to death. Imagine it. Finally he comes blasting in with about ten new acquaintances. They are all wealthy oil men from Alberta, but never mind – now they have learned all about how to start a dairy farm, right from the word go. Should the oil business ever fail, you understand. I don’t know what the hell the point of this story is, Rachel, or how I got started on it.”

  He’s easy to listen to. Easy as well, it almost seems, to reply to. If only it could be that way.

  “Cars. It started with cars. I think he sounds wonderful, your father.”

  Nick gives me a quick sideways glance.

  “Yeh. I get quite a kick out of him, myself.”

  He is suddenly withdrawn. What did I say wrong? He thinks it sounded false, or even worse – gushing. Is that it? Or what?

  “Here we are,” he says.

  The Roxy Theatre has never been a theatre, as far as I know, except for the occasional minstrel show years ago, put on for the Red Cross or some deserving cause. The movies used to change once a week. Now they change twice.

  “It’ll be crumby as hell, probably,” Nick says, looking suspiciously at the multi-tinted posters.

  He’s quite right, as it turns out. The film is indifferent, improbable. I can’t seem to concentrate on it. I don’t know what it’s about. I can hear him breathing, beside me, and he’s sprawled a little in the seat, close by.

  If he puts his arm around me, will I move closer or away? He won’t, of course. The High School kids do that. He’s thirty-five, not fifteen. He is past such gauche and public performances. What are you worried about, Rachel? I’m not worried. I’m perfectly all right. Well, relax, then. I am relaxed. Oh? Shut up. Just shut up.

  He does not shift himself in the movie seat to be even six inches closer. Well, why should he? Who would want to? We have discussed this a long time ago, you and I, Rachel. Haven’t you seen it yet?

  “Would you like some coffee?” Nick asks, when the picture is over.

  I would, but somehow I don’t want to walk into the Regal Café or the Parthenon. Like putting on an act which everyone would know for what it was, a charade.

  “Oh, thanks, but I think I’d better get straight home. Mother has a kind of uncertain heart. I’m always a little concerned in case –”

  “Are you?” Nick says. “Okay, then.”

  When we get to Japonica Street and the blue neon, he stops the car.

  “Thanks, Rachel.”

  “Thank you.”

  He laughs. “How polite you are. Are you always?”

  “Well –”

  But before I can say anything – not knowing anyway what could be said – he reaches over and puts his hands on my shoulders. He kisses gently and exploringly. I am – as though undecided. But it’s unreal, anyway. If it isn’t happening, one might as well do what one wants. His tongue is rough-textured and wet and has its own life inside my mouth. It is he who draws away, after a while, not me.

  “Well,” he says.

  Is he surprised, or what? I resent his surprise, if it is that. I’d like to let him know that I can want, too. I’m thirty-four. That’s not old. I haven’t fossilized. Why do people assume it’s so different for men? Is he laughing?

  When he kisses me again, I hold myself against him and feel the bones of his shoulders and his ribs, through his clothes. The skin on his face doesn’t smell of anything extraneous, nothing like shaving lotion or soap, only of himself. And when I put my face against his, and breathe him in – oh my God. Now I really do want him. Now I would do anything –

  Yet he’s put his hand on my breasts and I have actually pushed him away. He doesn’t resist. He accepts it. Why wouldn’t he? He didn’t want to touch me all that much.

  “I’ve – got to go in, now.” I suppose it must be my voice, although God only knows what it is saying. “I mean – Mother will be wondering where I am, you see, and –”

  “That wouldn’t do, w
ould it?” he says.

  He traces with his hand a line down my face, from my temple and across my cheekbone and down to my mouth. He is smiling in the darkness. I can’t see his smile but I know it is there, from his voice. It hurts as much as if he’d slapped me. More.

  “See you, Rachel,” he says.

  “Yes – I hope – I hope so,” I am inexcusably saying.

  Everything is automatic, walking up the sidewalk, hearing the car zoom away, opening the door and walking up the stairs. It is not the moment to think of anything. Only – is Mother in bed yet? Is she asleep? Is she awake, and has she noticed the car parked out there? How long a time has it been?

  “Rachel?”

  “Yes? Are you still awake?”

  “Well, dear, I was beginning to drift off, but I don’t ever settle down too well until you’re in. Was it a good movie?”

  “Very nice, thanks.”

  “Would you like a cup of coffee, dear?”

  “No, thanks. I think I’ll go straight to bed. Are you all right?”

  “Oh, yes. A little over-tired, maybe, that’s nothing out of the ordinary. I’ll be off to sleep in a while, probably, with any luck.”

  She didn’t do the laundry, of course. I saw that as soon as I turned on the kitchen light.

  “Did you have to take one of your heart pills?”

  “No, I didn’t think it was really necessary. It’s hard for me to judge, sometimes. But I thought if I lay down, it might be all right. I made myself some cocoa.”

  “Did you take a sleeping pill?”

  “Well, no. I thought –”

  She never sleeps without one. She can’t. Unaided sleep hasn’t been possible for her within my living memory.

  “I’ll bring you one now.”

  “Maybe that would be best. Thank you, dear.”

  Scarlet and blue capsule, and a glass of water. She is lying propped up on three pillows. She has washed off her powder and what little lipstick she uses, but she’s brushed her hair, I see, coaxed it into grey lace around her head, so that although wan she looks her best. Very touching. Oh – can I possibly be this mean? She might really have been ill when I was out, and might have died, and then I would have been forever in the wrong, not so much for going out but for feeling this way, for letting myself.

  “Did you have a nice time, dear, really?”

  “Quite nice, thank you. Sure you’re all right now?”

  “Quite sure. Goodnight, dear.”

  “Goodnight.”

  Finally I’m in my own room and can be by myself at last. It is not at all likely that I will see him again. If I think this now, it will make it easier for me, later, when it happens that way.

  FIVE

  The phone. If only I can reach it before Mother does. In the hall mirror I can see this giraffe woman, this lank scamperer. Slow down, Rachel. Yet I know now the phone is within my easy grasp, and I could pounce for it if I had to. I can’t be thinking this way. It isn’t like me.

  Mother is in the living room, dusting in small feathery strokes as though the duster were a chiffon handkerchief and she were waving it from some castle window. She is pretending not to be listening. I swear I’m going to get an extension cord put on this damn phone so I can take it into my bedroom. I won’t, though. How could I ever explain it in any way she could accept?

  “Hello –”

  “Hello. Rachel?”

  “Oh. Calla. Hello.”

  “Are you all right, Rachel?”

  “Of course I’m all right. Why shouldn’t I be?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. You sounded kind of – well, I guess it was just in my mind that you might not be well or something, as I haven’t seen you since holidays started.”

  “No, I’ve been quite all right. Just – you know – busy.”

  “Well, I’ve been wanting to phone you, but I sort of thought that you might be busy –”

  She expects me to say something. I won’t. Why does she have to phone me? Why can’t she leave me alone? Maybe I shouldn’t be rude to her. But if she keeps on phoning me in this way, she’s asking for it, isn’t she?

  “Well, I was busy. That’s what I said.”

  I didn’t intend to sound quite so snappish. But it’s her lookout. She’s asking for trouble. What does she think I am, anyway? Suddenly I’m terribly angry at her, so angry that I can hardly keep from putting the phone down, slamming the receiver.

  “I was just wondering,” Calla says, “if you’d like to go to a movie tonight. Or any time this week. Or next week.”

  There is a hesitance in her voice, something that has been there ever since that night. She never used to sound this way, but now she has to. Now she feels compelled to beg my pardon over and over again. I hate this. I ought to feel – what? Pity? No. Liberal-minded people feel compassion – it’s nicer. But all I feel is nothing. Only the desire for her to go away, and for myself not to have to be bothered, not to have to deal with this. Strangely, the anger is gone.

  “I’d like to go, Calla, but I don’t think I can for a while. I’m – I’m going to take an extension course in English, and I’ll be pretty well tied up with that for the rest of the month.”

  “You shouldn’t work all the time, Rachel.”

  “I want to get it done. That’s the only way I can work. I want to concentrate on it. I must.”

  I can hear my voice rising as I speak, growing edgy and shrill, defending my right to work as though it were in her power to keep me from it. And for a non-existent course. I didn’t want to tell lies. She forced me.

  “All right,” Calla says, with extreme quiet. “Okay. I get the point.”

  Oh God. She does, too. She doesn’t believe there’s a course, not for a second. She knows I would have had to register for a correspondence course, with the university, long before now, and that I would have mentioned it months ago.

  “Listen, Calla – I’ll phone you, eh? In a little while. When I’m – when I’ve got things straightened out.”

  “Yeh. Sure, Rachel. Okay.” Her voice sounds drab, unresisting.

  “When do you go to your brother’s?” I must take some interest; I must at least be polite.

  “I’m not going there this summer. Two of his kids have chickenpox, and I’ve never had it.”

  “Won’t you be going away at all, then?”

  “No. I’m kind of – oh, I don’t know – tired, I guess. I thought I’d just do nothing much. Anyway, I promised to help re-paint the woodwork at the Tabernacle.”

  The first she’s mentioned the place since that night. I have to say something. I must. Only to let her see it doesn’t matter to me – I’ve forgotten it – it was nothing, nothing of any importance. But my hands have tightened and I can feel the phone receiver slimy with sweat.

  “Oh. That’s nice. How is the Tabernacle these days?” Idiotic. As though I were asking after her aunt’s health.

  “Pretty good, thanks.”

  “I always meant to ask you –” Horribly, I can hear my squeaking giggle, “if you ever – you know – spoke in tongues –”

  “No. That hasn’t happened. The gift hasn’t been given to me.”

  Her voice is grave and sad, just as though something really had been withheld from her, something real, some kind of grace. Senselessly, this frightens me. Can’t I get away now? Haven’t we talked long enough?

  “Well – I’ll give you a ring, Calla.”

  What a stupid way of saying you’ll phone anyone. There’s an ambiguity about the phrase that seems both silly and sinister. I won’t say that again.

  “Fine. Don’t work too hard, Rachel.”

  “No, I won’t. Good-bye.”

  Did she mean that last remark as a crack? It doesn’t matter. But now I see I’m stuck with the lie, and will have to invent complicated explanations to cover it.

  Oh what a tangled web we weave

  When first we practise to deceive!

  Mother’s voice, lilting and ladylike, telling me
that as a child. I can’t remember what my sin was, only the burden of listening to the jingle, knowing she would never smack me and get it over with, because she never did – that wasn’t her way. She used to tell me over and over how my mis demeanours wounded her. They also hurt Jesus, as I recollect. Well, poor Jesus. No doubt He weathered it better than I did.

  Why couldn’t it have been Nick who phoned?

  That’s nonsense. I didn’t expect him to. He won’t. Why should he?

  I don’t know whether I want to see him or whether I only want to correct the impression he must have of me.

  “Rachel –”

  “Yes?”

  “I wasn’t listening,” Mother says, “but I couldn’t help hearing you mention some course or other. You never told me about it.”

  “It’s not definitely settled yet. I was only considering it.”

  “Well, of course it’s your own business, dear. I mean, you don’t have to tell me what you’re doing. It’s just that it seems a little odd, never to mention it.”

  “I’m sorry, Mother. It’s just that it wasn’t definite.”

  “Of course, dear, I quite understand. It’s perfectly all right. It isn’t as though I expect you to tell me everything you do. I mean, after all, it is your life, isn’t it? It’s just that it seemed rather a peculiar thing to keep quiet about. I mean, it isn’t as though there were any reason to conceal it.”

  “Please, Mother. Let’s not have a scene about it. Please.”

  “Scene? Of course not. I’m not annoyed, Rachel – you mustn’t think that. I couldn’t be annoyed over a thing like that. A little hurt, perhaps. But there. It’s probably foolish to feel that way. You have a perfect right to keep anything secret if you want to –”

  “It wasn’t a secret. It was – oh, never mind. I’m sorry. I just never thought, I guess. I’m sorry.”

  “Never mind, dear. Everyone’s thoughtless at times, I guess. I can’t expect –”

  This is our conversation. This is the way we talk, the way we go on.

  It’s been a week now since I went out with him. A week ago today. I don’t know why I even bother to think about it at all. It isn’t as though I ever expected him to ask me out again. He’s probably taking out some teenager now. Someone pretty, and obliging. And poised. A girl who is able to do everything easily.