Later that evening he took off his shoes. He tossed them casually under the grand piano and began dancing. Although he began dancing, he did not stop drinking. He was capable of balancing a full glass of wine on his forehead. He did that now; balancing and drinking, balancing and drinking. The removal of the shoes helped him with the balancing. It also helped him with the dancing. He didn’t need any help with the drinking.
The carpet was a soft grey colour and was made of pure wool. Wine from unbalanced glasses had formed permanent purple stains on its surface. But they were mementoes of another time, before he had become polished, practised, professional; before he had learned all there was to know about balance and before he had learned the little that he knew about dancing. He hadn’t spilled a drop for months now, except into his open mouth. What was more, he had become able, by a simple bending of the knees, to refill his glass without removing it from his forehead. A master indeed!
She watched him, with some embarrassment, from her wheelchair in the corner. She thought he looked ridiculous, then she thought he looked charming, then she thought he looked ridiculous again. She wondered if balancing acts like this were part of the awesome responsibility one assumed when one was able to move about of one’s own accord; that is to say, without the chair. She thought of balancing her teacup on her own forehead but realized that dancing was a necessary, and for her impossible, part of the routine.
Ah, but he was charming dancing there in her living room, moving precariously from step to step like a Niagara daredevil. But oh, there was such tension when he lurched forward or backward in order to prevent a tumble or spill. After a full evening of it she would be exhausted for days; lacking the strength to play show tunes on her piano, lacking the strength to whistle. In fact, she dreaded these performances, which caused her emotions to swing wildly from pleasure to tension and back again. And yet she was somehow addicted and, perhaps because she felt inwardly that no home should be without one, he danced for her often. And balanced too.
Although his neck was beginning to ache, he moved cautiously across the room to the shelf where the records were kept. The third album on the left towards the bottom was the original cast recording of Annie Get Your Gun. He admitted the music was dated and silly but he liked it none the less. There was, after all, no business like show business. He was living proof of that. He executed an awkward pirouette, took a healthy swallow of wine, and felt for the record like a blind man reading Braille. He fumbled with the cover and then with the machine. A few minutes later he was moving his arms in time to the tune as if to imitate enthusiastic singing. He did not remove the glass from his forehead.
She was beginning to find the sight of his Adam’s apple a bit disconcerting, but positioned as she was, in a room with staircases at every possible exit, she was unable to remove herself from the somewhat uncomfortable scene. She wondered if turning her wheelchair to face the wall would be interpreted as a violent gesture. She decided that, at the very least, it would appear discourteous. She began instead to sing halfheartedly along with the song. “Your favourite uncle died at dawn,” she sang quietly. “Top of that your Ma and Pa have parted / you’re broken-hearted / but you go on,” she continued. And as she continued his acrobatics seemed charming again, even the lurches. Such is the mysterious power of even the mildest form of participation.
He thought about the ceiling. When he was balancing it filled the entire sphere of his peripheral vision. The ceiling, he decided, was to him now what the floor had been at dancing school; the floor where he had watched his shoes collide with the patent leather attached to the feet of the girls in the class. They who were so much more graceful than he, they who were so much taller. From then on he attributed most of his problems with women to an inability to keep his feet in places where patent leather wasn’t. It had soured every relationship and chipped away at his confidence until he had avoided dancing girls altogether. And then one day he had discovered the lady in the wheelchair, and slowly he had begun to dance again, and not only to dance but to balance.
She thought about the hospital and how there was no music there; just the public address system constantly uttering the monotonous names of doctors. There weren’t any balancers either. Not unless you took into consideration those few unsteady individuals who had recently been released from crutches. They had practised a kind of delicate, fumbling dance, as if their very bodies were as fragile as the glass this man carried on his forehead. They should have had some music, she concluded in retrospect, while listening to the tune of her own vocal cords increase in volume.
He began to hear her song above the strings and trumpets of the recording. It sounded small and feeble, but it was there none the less. My goodness, she knows the words, he thought as he performed another lurching pirouette. He bent his knees beside the table, refilled his glass, quickly drank the contents, and filled it again. “There’s no people like show people,” he heard her warble in a voice that seemed to be getting stronger and then, “they smile when they are low.” He cracked his knuckles once or twice to show her that balancing wasn’t the only thing that he did well.
By now there was no doubt in her mind that she liked the song. There was also no doubt in her mind that she liked singing the song. Even his Adam’s apple was no longer an unpleasant sight when she was singing. In fact, it began to resemble the cheerful bouncing ball of a sing-along film. “Even with a turkey that you know will fold, you might be stranded out in the cold,” she sang with great vitality. As her mind discovered rhythm her hands beat time on the leather armrests of her wheelchair. She moved everything she could; her mouth, her forehead, her shoulders, her eyebrows, her arms, her stomach. She thought it was a shame that she couldn’t tap her patent leather shoes. Just after she had shouted “next day on your dressing room they’ve hung a star” and was about to bellow “let’s go on with the show,” his glass fell to the floor.
The next morning he was gone. This was no surprise to her. He was always gone the next morning. Gone, gone, gone. She counted the stains on her one-hundred-percent-wool rug … ten … no, eleven now. The most recent pool was a deeper, richer crimson than the rest, not having had the benefit of time to soften it. She was unable to understand why he had wept when his glass tumbled to the floor the previous evening. Surely not out of consideration for the carpet. Compositionally, in fact, this particular spill was rather well placed and enhanced the general scheme. He’ll get over it, she decided. He always did, and as far as she could gather, he always would.
Then she noticed the shoes. He was gone but his shoes were not. They lay, under the piano, where he had so casually tossed them just before he started balancing. You could tell that they had been abandoned. The laces looked tangled, confused, miserable. The tongues lolled obscenely like those of hanged men. One shoe lay on its side and looked as injured and pathetic as an animal that has recently been struck by a car. The other sat bolt upright as if listening for its master’s voice. How on earth, she wondered, did he ever get home?
Beyond her window lay a fresh, consistent inch of snow. It must have fallen while she was sleeping. It covered the lawns and the sidewalks. It covered the roofs and the roads. Although it was a cloudy day, reflected white light created the illusion of sunshine and brightened the interior of her home. It added a cheerful overtone to the spectacle of the deserted shoes.
His car had made tracks in the snow. The tracks moved out of the driveway, arced briefly, and advanced toward the end of the street. The long scars they made on the white surface of the road allowed bits of the asphalt to show through—indicating that this was not a cold, definite snow, but one that was likely to disappear by mid-afternoon. She thought that, perhaps, its only function was to remind her of the season and to illustrate the fact of the man’s departure: the empirical proof of something she had learned long ago through experience. A kind of resignation settled over her spirit.
Then, as she was about to turn from the window to begin her day, something familiar caught her eye. Pressed into the snow, which lay on the pathway leading from her door to her driveway, were two, long, continuous lines. They might have been made by two children riding bicycles side by side in the snow. They might have been made by a sled. They might even have been made by a baby carriage. But she knew, as surely as she had walked across the room to the window, that they had been made, early that morning, by a departing wheelchair.
She pirouetted once on her patent leather shoes. Then she danced joyfully into the kitchen to make her breakfast. Later that day she would skip to the supermarket to buy a spray can filled with rug shampoo. But not until she’d taken his shoes to the Salvation Army.
As might be expected, her wedding-night dreams were both weird and eventful, taking her in and out of countries that she didn’t even know existed. She would later attribute these flights of fancy to the after-effects of the food served at the reception. But that night the dreams gave her no time to ponder the reasons for their arrival. They just kept happening, one after another, until the one about the wheelchairs woke her up, shouting.
But not in fear, or at least not from any worry about her safety. She had felt, in fact, during the course of the dream, remarkably detached, as if she had been watching a play in which she had only one line; a line that was spoken from the wings. But when it came time for her to speak that line she was aware, even in the dream, that it came from some other, surer part of her brain, from those same heretofore-unrecognized countries.
“Don’t forget your seatbelts! Don’t forget your seatbelts!” she cried, waking both John and herself.
“Seatbelts!” he said. “What seatbelts?”
She confessed her dream. All the men she had known in her relatively short life had been presented to her in series, like credits at the end of a film. They were all in wheelchairs, but such wheelchairs! Suspended on thin strong ropes they gave their occupants the opportunity to swing back and forth against a clear blue sky. The men involved had looked to her like strange trapeze artists or happy preschool children on playground swings. They were having, it appeared, a wonderful time. Then for reasons unknown even to herself, the cautionary business of the seatbelts had grabbed her vocal cords.
Having no personal use for interpretation of any kind John pronounced the dream absurd and therefore boring. She agreed; they laughed and fell easily back to sleep.
The next morning they jogged two miles along the beach. She was always surprised by the response that the sight of a naked pair of male legs awoke in her. It was honest visual pleasure combined with admiration for a supple functioning form bereft of excess. Male excess was distributed elsewhere, in the face, around the middle, but rarely in the legs. They were holy territory, uninhabited by fat cells. They were perfectly fabricated systems designed, perhaps, to carry primitive hunters quietly and swiftly through some complicated forest. Now they carried John across the sand, through the wind, and along the frothy edges of the sea. Later, in the city, they would carry him through the labyrinth of street and subway to an office every weekday for the rest of his life. She watched the large muscle at the back of his thigh flex and relax with the rhythm of running.
Over lunch, which was served on the terrace of the hotel, they discussed the gifts they had received and divided them into three categories: lovely, passable, and impossible. Yellow was her favourite colour, so all of the yellow paraphernalia slipped easily into the “lovely” category. The steadily increasing profusion of yellow objects had been, in fact, a great comfort to her in the week or so preceding the wedding. She imagined the one-bedroom apartment they had chosen filling up with radiant sunlight like the gold-leaf backgrounds she had seen in old paintings. She pictured herself bent over a sewing machine stitching yellow gingham curtains while stew bubbled in the yellow enamel pot on the stove. There was also in this picture an image of John, threading his way through the subway system, coming home, on his long lithe legs, to her. At night, she imagined, they would rub themselves all over with the gift of giant yellow bath towels, just before they slipped between the gift of flowered yellow stay-press sheets.
She thought of John’s legs rising without a ripple from the yellow bath mat at his feet.
In the category of “impossible” they placed such items as Blue Mountain pottery and salt and pepper shakers with the words salty and peppy burned into them.
In “passable” they placed such items as electric frying pans and waffle irons.
This kind of classification game was one they played often. It had the twofold positive effect of supplying them with conversational material and providing them with a well-ordered private universe. Where categories were concerned they agreed on everything: from music to cocktails, from politics to comic strips, from airports to laundromats. Their value systems were as assured and as tidy as the Holiday Inn at which they were staying. It was all very comforting.
Games notwithstanding, they were neither of them children. He had practised law for a full five years and had, just recently, been offered a partnership in the firm. In his usual practical, deliberate way he had waited a week or so before saying yes to the proposition. It was the same week that she had handed in her resignation to the paper, giving marriage as her excuse. She felt little regret at the prospect of abandoning her career. Although it had been the job she wanted, the job she had studied for, it had quickly passed through a phase of novelty and into the hazy realm of habit—like most of her affairs. A few days before she left, the girls in the office held a small shower for her. A lot of the accumulated yellow objects were a result of this event.
A combination of the beer they had consumed with lunch and their first morning of strong sunshine had made them feel sleepy. They decided to return to the room for a rest. The desk clerk smiled benignly as they passed through the lobby, his face altering to the odd grimace of a man barely able to suppress a wink. He was aware of their honeymoon status. She remembered passing through similar lobbies of similar hotels with men she had not been married to. The desk clerks there had remained tactfully aloof, the situation being less easy to classify.
After they made love John rolled over and lit a cigarette. Some of the smoke became trapped in the few beams of sun that had managed to penetrate the heavy curtains.
“Why wheelchairs?” he asked. “Why were they in wheelchairs?”
“Who?” she replied drowsily from the other side of the bed.
“Your boyfriends, your boyfriends in the dream.”
“Who knows?” she said, falling asleep. “Who ever knows in dreams?”
Later in the afternoon, when they awakened from their nap, John would decide to go for a swim. She would decide to sit on the balcony and write thank-you notes to her friends, the generous donors of “the lovely, the passable, and the impossible.” “Dear Lillian,” she would begin. Then something would capture her attention. It would be the sight of John walking down across the beach towards the water, walking on his beautiful spare legs. With his back turned he would be unaware that she was watching him. He would become smaller and smaller until, at last, he would collapse into the water. She would study the predictable repetitious motions of the waves surrounding him until, with a kind of slow horror, she would realize that the organized behaviour of the Atlantic was what the rest of her life would be, one week following another, expectations fulfilled in easy categories, and the hypnotic monotony of predictable responses. Oh, my God, she would think briefly—why does he seem to be having such a good time?
Then she would dismiss this and all other related thoughts from her mind forever and continue her thank-you note.
“Dear Lillian,” she would write, “John and I just love Blue Mountain pottery.”
When she arrived at the hospital they put her in a wheelchair. Under the circumstances this seemed somewhat absurd. Certainly there was something wrong with her. Yes, something was definitely wrong with her. But nothing, as far as she knew, was wrong with her legs. At least not yet. But then she remembered. In hospitals they always put you in a wheelchair. Regardless of what the problem was, if you could still sit up they put you in a wheelchair. Probably to assure you that you were sick, even if you weren’t.
But she was sick. Just that morning she had announced to him, between sobs, “Harold, I’m sick,” and then, when he didn’t respond, “I’m sick, Harold. Put me in the hospital!”
After that he had sighed, put down the newspaper, and walked across the room to the telephone. She had continued to sob, her face buried in her hands, but she had left a tiny crack between her fingers so that she could see what he was doing. He was fumbling through his address book looking for the phone number of the doctor.
“God, he’s slow!” she mumbled to no one in particular.
Eventually, and on the kindly advice of the family physician, he had taken her to the hospital. But let it be noted that he took his sweet time about it. It seemed to her that they had driven around each block six times before advancing to the next. She was probably right. He often played little tricks like this when he was taking her to the hospital. He hated taking her to the hospital. He thought it was ridiculous. She was perfectly aware of his feelings but she was also aware that they got there none the less. So there she sat in the wheelchair and there he stood at the admitting desk yawning over the same old tedious forms. She gathered together all the loathing she could muster and aimed it at the indentation just beneath his skull and in the centre of his shaved neck. To her amusement he brought his left hand up and scratched that very spot, just as he might have had an insect landed there.
She didn’t like him much and that was the truth. He didn’t like her much either, but then, what did he like? Certainly not his job at the Kleaning Cloth factory, which was boring and repetitious; certainly not his children who had, mercifully, all grown up and moved away; certainly not his dog who bit him daily, on his departure for and his arrival from the Kleaning Cloth factory, and certainly not these idiotic forms he had to fill out every single time he brought her to the hospital. He also didn’t like the itchy feeling he got at the base of his neck each time he turned his back in her presence. The terrible truth about all these things was that they were, in his eyes, ridiculous as well. Not only was she ridiculous but everything connected to her was ridiculous: her tears were ridiculous, her meals were ridiculous, and whatever the hell was wrong with her was ridiculous. Her ridiculous doctors, in their ridiculous, kindly wisdom, could not bring themselves to tell him what was, in fact, wrong with her. Finally he stopped asking, and the minute he stopped asking he stopped caring.
Her suitcase, he knew, was filled with ridiculous negligées, which she had ordered, over the years, from the back sections of movie magazines and comic books kept especially for her hospital experiences. He handed this precious cargo to a nurse who had appeared, like a long-awaited taxi, around the corner. Then he turned to leave. Just as he was about to enter the revolving glass doors he heard the nurse chirp to his wife, “And how are we today?” He thought this was a ridiculous question to ask anyone who sat sobbing in a wheelchair.
When she was certain that he had gone she stopped sobbing. Soon she was gliding through green halls, in and out of elevators, past rooms filled with fragrant flowers. She looked forward, with great pleasure, to her lunch which she knew would arrive on silent rubber wheels and would include fluorescent pink Jello topped with Dream Whip. Once in her room she picked out a fluorescent pink negligée to wear, knowing that it would match the Jello. Then she slipped between the delicious, starched white sheets and relaxed against the smooth, firm fibre of the hospital mattress. Let the bastard pack his own Twinkies, she said to herself just before she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
She awoke an hour later to the arrival of her anticipated lunch. It was everything that she had hoped and she devoured it with relish, right down to the last, tiny, quivering mouthful. Then she reached into the night table drawer for the two wonderful books that she had stuffed into her suitcase along with the negligées. One of these books was entitled Lovelier After Forty and the other How to Develop Your Personality, A New You! Both had been written by an ex-heavyweight champion with whom she was, of course, in love. She could never hope to meet him but she was in love with him anyway. Contact was incidental. It was the tone of his words that attracted her. They were easy words; words that made her feel warm and comfortable in a way that Harold never had. During her frequent stays at the hospital she would often spend her afternoons imagining “the champion” (as she secretly called him) bending over her like a parasol of rippling muscles and shining skin, breathing easy words into her ears.
“Many a homely younger woman has, through persistence, turned herself into a beautiful, lovable, older woman,” he would whisper, and then, “You are not alone. There are order and truth and eternal reality in the universe.”
And when she danced with him upon the shores of her imagination he crooned exotic instructions into the microphone of her brain.
“Draw hips slightly forward then flick backwards quickly as if to strike imaginary wall with buttocks …,” he would sigh. Then she would sigh and chant along with his ballroom litanies, while her stark, private room turned from institution to palace, to mysterious night club, to the starlight lounge, to Hernando’s Hideaway.
During this particular stay at the hospital, dancing took up some of her time but the greatest portion of her energy was devoted to personal development; that is, the development of her NEW SELF, a self that would necessarily be lovelier after forty. There were, she knew, seven success secrets and the champion had assured her that the mastery of these would result in a young and magnetic personality. SECFIMP was the key, seven was the number:
| 1 | S | Sincerity |
| 2 | E | Enthusiasm |
| 3 | C | Charity |
| 4 | F | Friendliness |
| 5 | I | Initiative |
| 6 | M | Memory |
| 7 | P | Persistence |
And the greatest of these was charity.
How kind she was to the champion, sewing imaginary buttons on his skin-tight clothing and cooking up imaginary feasts in her brain. She allowed him to read newspapers or watch ball games all night and she never complained. She ironed his imaginary socks. She kept his imaginary house spotlessly clean and she never burdened him with her own insignificant problems. She showed a definite interest in his career, encouraging him to confess to her those tiny nagging moments of self-doubt that afflict every man at one stage or another. But most importantly, she wore her negligées constantly in an effort to keep herself as young and attractive as she was the day she first imagined him.
He was pleased but not entirely satisfied. He introduced her to his greatest beauty secret—a three-week plan to beautify her bust contour. He assured her that no one was more interested in helping her with this delicate problem than he. He sympathized. He understood. Hadn’t he once been a ninety-pound weakling, who through persistent effort had raised himself to the very heights of power and personal magnetism? Hadn’t he counselled countless other women who were suffering from the misery and self-consciousness of possessing an unattractive bosom? Didn’t he know everything there was to know about the growth and tone of pectoral muscles? Of course he did. Of course he had. And he would help her by setting out a rigid schedule of exercises that she could begin that very day.
The weeks rolled by both in illusion and in reality. Nurses glided in and out of her makeshift gym. They trod softly on squeaky shoes. They carried their trays of Jello and Dream Whip with courtly precision. They wrote mysterious messages on the chart at the foot of her bed. They gathered in huddles and murmured outside her door. They brought in fresh white slabs of clean starched sheets. They distributed pills and tiny paper cups filled with lukewarm water. They administered enemas. Their wedding bands glowed on their smooth white hands. And they tactfully ignored the presence of the champion, to all intents and purposes didn’t see him at all. And so, of course, they couldn’t notice how, when the wheelchair, which would take their patient back to the lobby where Harold was waiting, appeared at the door, a man in skin-tight clothing put down his barbells and scratched the back of his neck, just as he might have had an insect landed there.
Monsieur Delacour was certain that it was spring. “Spring is here,” he announced, silently, to himself. The thought rattled in the rafters of his brain, avoiding altogether the area phrenologists label voice. Monsieur Delacour hadn’t had a voice for years. Some mysterious being or event had snatched it away from him and, the truth was, Monsieur Delacour couldn’t have cared less.
He also didn’t care about his left side. Whoever or whatever had snatched away the voice part of his brain had also made off with the area that controls the left arm and leg. And so Monsieur Delacour got around with the aid of a wooden crutch and his wonderful talent for hopping. A long, thin man, who had always resembled a large wading bird, Monsieur Delacour had adjusted, years ago, to his one-legged method of transportation. It suited him just fine. Later a doctor would actually remove the non-functioning left leg. But, at the moment, it was still attached to Monsieur Delacour. Still, he didn’t care about it. Not one bit.
He did, however, care about spring, and now, despite the winter chill that still hung in the air, he knew it was spring. His stubborn belief was based on the fact that today, for the first time in six months, a tiny feeble ray of sun had entered the damp octagonal square where Monsieur Delacour’s house occupied a corner. The sunbeam had paused briefly on a mouldy stone wall and then had quickly disappeared as if it were in a hurry to visit more attractive places; where grasses, or even weeds, were conceivable.
But sun, you say, can enter enclosed spaces even in winter. Not these spaces, not those winters. The sun had barely the strength to drag itself above the horizon, never mind the bravery to invade the narrow twisting streets and the slimy paved piazzas of Monsieur Delacour’s home town. Tall mossy walls everywhere, grey-green vegetation of the parasitic variety, everyone relocated or dead of the plague in the year 1527; that’s what it was like. We tourists love places like this. We think they look like the environments of fairy tales. We have never lived there.
But Monsieur Delacour loved it too—because it was his home town and because it provided him with a corner in which to live. Here he did what he could with his chickens and rabbits, did what he could with his wife. It had become apparent, early in his relationship with her, that whoever or whatever had snatched away the parts of his brain labelled voice, left arm, and left leg, had decided to leave the area marked privates totally unaltered. Hence Monsieur Delacour could do a great deal with his wife. And at the moment that we find him watching the sun on the wall he had eight children. And there would be more.
Monsieur Delacour’s wife was a handful. “She’s a handful,” said Monsieur Delacour, silently. Then he chuckled to himself. Like everything else the chuckle rattled in the rafters of his brain, refused, as it was, the release of vocal cords. A large woman, whose remaining teeth had been seriously eroded by the constant assault of chocolate, Madame Delacour was interested in everything: from weather to underwear, from school to defecation, from witches to astronauts, from politics to wheelchairs. And she would talk to anyone; to you or me or dogs or cats or chickens or the mayor or the curé. It was all the same to her.
It was winter that made her a handful. In a town where nothing happens in the summer, less than nothing happens in the winter and Madame Delacour became bored. Nothing helped: not the television, which by virtue of its size blocked the only window in the house; not the kids, whose collective naughty imagination would keep the most blasé among us on our toes; not the constant supply of chocolate which was made possible by cheques from the state that arrived at the door. Winter bored her, absolutely and completely, and nothing helped. Nothing, that is, except death.
Madame Delacour was fervently drawn to the drama and ceremony of death. Not her own, of course. That was, as she wisely knew, a party she could not attend. But anyone else’s fascinated her. She appeared at all the funerals she could, dressed appropriately for the occasion in her vast purple dress and with lipstick smeared all over her wide mouth and sparse teeth. She mourned with the mourners and eulogized with the eulogizers. Often her sadness was sincere, but more often the excitement that death causes in a small town cancelled all but the most fleeting of sorrows. Madame Delacour at a funeral was like a child at a birthday party, and the corpse like a brand new, recently unwrapped gift.
But there was a small problem. There were simply not enough deaths to keep her occupied. The tiny population of the town could only produce a certain number each year, and although most of these occurred, conveniently, in the darkest and most boring part of the winter, Madame Delacour became restless and dissatisfied. Boredom waited for her on the street after each funeral. She began to invent deaths.
And so it came to be that, after a few long dark winters, almost everyone in the town had been reported dead three or four times before they, in fact, expired. Madame Delacour became, as Monsieur Delacour so aptly and so silently put it, a handful. Even the dogs and the chickens avoided her chatter. Everyone likes to discuss the actual death of a neighbour, but invented death is something else. It’s foolish to weep and bemoan the fate of a friend who, at that very moment, is buying two tins of pâté and a grosse baguette in the local épicerie. And it’s most embarrassing if and when the friend in question finds out about your outburst of emotion. And so, as Madame Delacour found fewer and fewer people with whom to discuss imaginary death she turned more and more to her husband.
Monsieur Delacour loved his wife. And it wasn’t that he was against death either. He just didn’t care about it one bit. Someone or something could come and snatch it away for all the difference it would make to him. He was far more interested in the children, chickens and rabbits who all fitted nicely, if a little snugly, into his small corner in the square. He liked to watch their numbers increase. It was something he could count on. He wished his wife had something she could count on too, for Monsieur Delacour was as certain as could be that all of the important deaths had already happened.
Because he could not speak, Monsieur Delacour’s thoughts consisted mostly of observations and explanations, which he put to himself in the form of announcements. Questions were, you might say, out of the question since they could not be articulated. And only occasionally did he make decisions; only when it was absolutely necessary. He felt it was necessary now.
“Spring is here,” he announced, silently, to himself. “In spring Madame Delacour visits the larger square near the church and watches the tourists come and go. Then she makes up stories about the people she has seen there; movie stars and counts and earls, thieves and convicted murderers, millionaires and soccer players, queens and presidents all stream into her imagination and the power of death subsides. She will be perfectly happy watching this parade of strangers that lasts through the summer and on into the fall. But then the fanciful funerals will begin again. Something has to be done about her.”
And, oddly enough, just that morning Social Services had decided that they must do something about Monsieur Delacour. Around nine o’clock a plump, cheerful man had leapt out of a white van. Then he had dragged a brand new wheelchair into Monsieur Delacour’s kitchen. He had sat in it himself in order to demonstrate its safety and efficiency. He had shown Monsieur Delacour how to work the gears and manipulate the wheels. It had shone in the grimy kitchen as brightly as a diamond tiara. It was like a carriage for a king. And Monsieur Delacour didn’t care about it at all. It seemed to him to be just one more contraption that might be snatched away at any moment. So, as soon as the white van had pulled away, Monsieur Delacour hopped outside to his stone bench in order to watch for spring.
It was the combination of the change of the season and the appearance of the wheelchair that gave him the idea and that brought about the decision. He would give Madame Delacour the wheelchair for the winter. He didn’t, after all, care about it one bit and, unlike the use of his voice, left arm and left leg, he could be sure that he had donated it to a worthy cause. With a little goat’s bell attached to it, and a colourful cushion placed in the seat, it would be the perfect vehicle for her imagination. She could spend the winter months inventing the illnesses that had forced her into the chair; illnesses that were awe-inspiring but not fatal—a party she could attend. She would turn her attention away from other people’s deaths and towards her own diseases.
Monsieur Delacour leaned back against the cold stone wall behind him. Anticipation rattled happily through his brain. First he anticipated the summer afternoons when the sun would warm (though never dry) the stones around his corner. Then he anticipated the seven pink petunias Madame Delacour could place in a box outside the single window that the television blocked. Then he thought about his own death, which he didn’t care about in the least, but which would be the greatest of his gifts to Madame Delacour. And finally, with a definite smile, he thought about Madame Delacour, herself, and how she would look in her winter wheelchair, moving through the streets of town, accompanied by the distant voice of a tiny bell. Freed from the clutches of boredom her face, he decided, would reflect a combination of invented pain and immeasurable happiness.
All but one of his students were drawing the canopied bed. Eleven of them were fixed, with furious attention, on the object, puzzling out the perspective and gritting their teeth over the intricate folds provided by the drapery of its rather dirty velvet curtains. Pencils in hand they twitched, scratched heads, scratched paper and erased. Individually, each studied his neighbour’s work and vowed to give up drawing altogether. Collectively, they laboured with a singleness of purpose worthy of great frescoed ceilings and large blocks of marble. All for the rendering of a rather tatty piece of furniture where someone, long forgotten, had no doubt slept and maybe died.
He walked silently behind the group, noting how the object shrank, swelled, attained monumentality, or became deformed from notebook to notebook. What, he wondered, brought them to this? In a building full of displayed objects, why this automatic attraction to the funereal cast of velvet and dark wood? This must be the bed that the child in all of them longed to possess; to draw the dusty curtains round and suffocate in magic of contained privacy. It would be as cosy and frilly and mysterious as the darkened spaces underneath the fabric of their mother’s skirts. The womb, he concluded, moves them like a magnet in all or any of its symbolic disguises.
The twelfth of the bunch was drawing a stuffed bird. Mottled by time and distorted by the glass bell that covered it, it pretended, without much credibility, to be singing its heart out perched on a dry twig. Its former colours, whatever they might have been, were now reduced to something approaching grey. The face of the young man who had chosen to reproduce this bundle of feathers was reflected once in the glass bell and again in the display case, and was also greyish. The drawing master glanced quickly over the young man’s shoulder and discovered, as he had expected, a great deal of nothing. Fifteen years in the profession had taught him to read all signs with cynicism. A student who kept aloof from the crowd, or chose alternate subject matter: these, to his mind, were social rather than creative decisions.
“You must like birds, Roger,” he commented wryly, and then, “There are some who seem to prefer beds.”
The young man’s face acquired a spot of colour, but in no other way did he respond to the remark.
The drawing master moved on. At this point there was little he could do for them except leave them alone. This was usually the case once he had taught them the rules: he believed, through it all, that the rules were the bones of the work. Within the structure they provided, great experiments could be performed, giant steps could be taken. And so his students suffered through weeks of colour theory, months of perspective. They reduced great painting to the geometry of compositional analysis. Like kindergarten children, they arranged triangles and squares on construction paper. Then, after a written test, in which the acquired basics were transposed to paper, he hired a small bus and drove them to this old, provincial museum, where he allowed them to choose their own subject matter. Year after year, the drawing master searched in vain for the student who would make the giant step, who would perform the great experiment, just as year after year he looked for evidence of the same experiment, the same step, in his own work.
The drawing master moved on and now he was looking for his own subject matter. For he had brought with him a small bottle of ink and a tin box in which he kept his straight pen and his nibs. He could feel this paltry equipment weighing down his right-hand pocket, altering somewhat the drape of his jacket. Aware of this, he often rearranged the tools giving himself the look of a man with an abundance of coins that he like to jingle. Then he shifted his shoulders back and mentally convinced himself that a slight bulge at the hip could not alter a look of dignity so long in the making. There were still, after all, the faultless cravat, the leather pants, and the well-trimmed beard speckled with grey.
And now he began to move past display cases; one filled with butter presses, another with spinning wheels, still another containing miniature interiors of pioneer dwellings, complete with tiny hooked rugs and patchwork quilts. He paused briefly before the collection of early Canadian cruets, interested in the delicate lines of twisted silver. But they turned to drawings so quickly in his mind that the actual execution on paper seemed futile and boring and he walked away from them. Past blacksmith’s tools and tomahawks, past moccasins and arrowheads and beadwork, past churns and depressed glass, past century-old pottery from Quebec and early models of long-silent telephones, past ridiculously modern mannequins clothed in the nineteenth century, until he found himself looking through the glass of a window and out into the fields.
And then he thought of the drive through the countryside to this small county museum, which had been situated, with the intention of pleasing both, between the two major towns of the surrounding vicinity. The students, nervous and silent in such close quarters with their teacher, had offered little interference to the flow of his consciousness and he had almost become absorbed by the rush of the landscape as it flashed past the windows of the van. A strong wind had confused the angle of fields of tall grass and had set the normally well-organized trees lurching against the sky. Laundry had become desperate splashes of colour in farm-yards. Even the predictable black-and-white of docile cows seemed temporary, as if they might be sent spiralling towards fence wire like so much tumbleweed. The restlessness of this insistent motion, this constant churning hyperactivity, had distracted the drawing master, but he had felt the strong, hard-edged responsibility of the highway to such an extent that even now, when he observed the landscape through the safe, confining frame of the window, he was somehow unable to grasp it. And he turned back towards the interior of the museum.
Here he sketched, for his own amusement and possibly for the amusement of his children at home, two or three elderly puppets that hung dejectedly from strings attached to flat wooden crosses. Completing, with a few well-executed strokes, the moronic wide-eyed stare of the last one, he cleaned the nib of his pen with a rag that he carried with him for that purpose, and prepared to return to his class. Then his eye was caught by a large white partition set back against the left-hand corner of the room. He walked over to it with a kind of idle curiosity and peered around its edge.
There, awaiting either repair or display case, and hopelessly stacked together like tumbling hydro towers, were five Victorian wicker wheelchairs. A few had lost, either through over-use or neglect, the acceptable curve of their shape and sagged over their wheels like fat women. One had retained its shape but the woven grid of its back was interrupted by large gaping holes. The small front wheels of another had become permanently locked into a pigeon-toed position through decades of lack of oil. All in all they appeared to be at least as crippled as their absent occupants must have been—as if by some magic process each individual’s handicap had been mysteriously transferred to his chair. The drawing master was fascinated. He had found his subject matter.
An hour later he had completed five small drawings. They were, as he knew, his best. The crazy twisted personality of each chair distributed itself with ease across the surface of the paper. Expressed in his fine line their abandoned condition became wistfully personal, as sad as forsaken toys in the attic or tricycles in the basement, childless for years. Vacant coffins, open graves, funeral wreaths—they were all there, competing with go-carts and red wagons. The drawing master carefully placed his precious drawings in his jacket pocket. When he arrived home that evening he would mat and frame them and put them under glass. But now he would stroll casually over to his pupils, who had dispersed and were wandering around the room gazing absently into display cases.
Except for the one young man who seemed still to be involved in the rendering of the dead bird. The drawing master approached him and bent over his shoulder to offer his usual words of quiet criticism—perhaps a few words about light and shade, or something about texture. He drew back, however, astonished. There before him on the paper was a perfectly drawn skeleton of a bird, and surrounding that and sometimes covering it or being covered by it, in a kind of crazy spatial ambiguity, drawn in by the student with the blunt ends of a pocketful of crayons, was the mad, turbulent landscape. It shuddered and heaved and appeared to be germinating from the motionless structure of the bird whose bones the young man had sensed beneath dust and feathers. It needed no glass to protect it, no frame to confine it. And it was as confused and disordered and wonderful as everything the drawing master had chosen to ignore.