I saw him in the library. I was coming upstairs from the lower level devoted to fiction to the main level check-out. He was at the counter, in profile, old and composed. His skin was smooth, his hair was evenly grey, he was wearing an elegant black coat. This was the first time I had seen him in eight years.
I hesitated for only a second (Peter eyeing Mr. McGregor and beyond him the gate), then walked quickly right behind him, my eyes fixed on the turnstile ahead, and beyond that, the revolving doors. Whether he saw me when I passed behind him or recognized me from the back (I would have recognized him from any angle), I don’t know. I passed within two feet of him and had to wait for a man to emerge from the revolving doors. Then the doors spat me into the lobby where sliding doors opened and I was in the street.
Still I didn’t relax. I stood on the corner with my back to the library straddling both possibilities: left or right, whichever first turned green, waiting to spring forward at the first break in traffic. For the rest of the day I felt shaken, overpowered by the black and dapper figure waiting to check out books.
The new black coat was a surprise. Could it be cashmere? Leonard Brooks in a cashmere coat? But that would require money and he didn’t spend money. Leonard the non-spender, Leonard the non-reader, Leonard alone – who was never alone. In an expensive new coat and unaccompanied, taking out books.
At home I made a pot of tea and looked out the window for a long time. I looked for big words to balance all the hurts – innocence, betrayal, humiliation. But big words don’t begin to compensate for small memories: the film of grime in his bathroom, the smell from the one damp towel, the stray hairs in the sink and on the floor, the tired joke about his new pair of sheets waiting for the right occasion, the thought of his body, his softness, his sentimentality. The pity he aroused, the companionship he offered, the need he sensed in me, the need he cultivated so well. The cardboard box he used for a bedside table, the late-night phone calls, the unannounced arrivals for dinner, the refusal to buy furniture, the man as child, the sexual fear. He used to phone me after I had fallen asleep and say, “Meet me for breakfast at the Star Café, eight o’clock, don’t be late. And Bethie?”
“Yes.”
Here are some memories, Bethie’s memories of Leonard B.
Soft waist. Receding hairline. Long nails. The kindness and manipulation. The propriety and dishonesty. The cagey unconscious bullshit.
I remember him telling me once, when he was very tired, that he felt like a crushed rose. It was evening. He was sitting across from me in a booth in a restaurant, a small prematurely old man resting his head in his left hand, the palm scarred from breaking a lamp when he was three, the Mender fingers tipped by those unnerving nails.
“When you were growing up what did you want to be?” I asked him.
“A child,” he said. “I was happy as a child.”
The child rarely strayed from the movies on TV. He absorbed Maurice Chevalier’s smile, too large for a face that retained the pallor and quickness-to-tire of a long boyhood sickness. His eyes were permanently soft and tender, tattooed by the pale blue light from so much secondhand romance. “You have to see Moulin Rouge” he told me, “it teaches so much about loneliness.”
I had heard this before. I didn’t think I had much to learn about loneliness. By this time, Leonard made me feel lonelier than anyone else I knew.
There was the man’s growth of hair on those soft boy arms, uncultivated, unwanted, unweeded, like long hairs dangling from the sides of a brash, or pubic hairs gone grey and sparse. There was the way he put his arms around my waist and pulled me towards his face. I would smile, turn my head to one side, or lean back if our foreheads touched. Those hugs went on for a long time, each one and all of them together, pressing me against his soft body while he whispered into my ear, “Mad about you, so mad about you.” I turned my head away from his breath.
We used to work together and we used to work late (I mean late; sometimes finishing the magazine at dawn), then we walked through Allan Gardens past the illuminated fountain, the greenhouse, the flowerbeds, to a bench where we sank down and breathed in the heavy scent of dust, fumes, grass, garbage, perfume. Leonard talked and I listened. Politics, old movies, baseball, odd encounters, figures from history; he had a way with an anecdote, a joke, a telling phrase; I listened, and there wasn’t a single thing he said that wasn’t interesting. What do I remember now of all those well-turned sentences? That he loved Johnny Carson, that he wanted to be on TV, that he saw himself as a natural entertainer, a witty unassuming moral figure who deserved uninterrupted applause.
He was thirty-five and seemed older. I was twenty-seven and seemed younger. Younger and nicer.
He walked me to the streetcar, then wouldn’t let me get on. Just one more block. Then another. All the way to Parliament Street.
His hands tightened if I pulled away too soon. Shapely hands with single long hairs growing out of the soft skin on their backs. In elementary school a girl had told him he had nice fingernails for a boy.
In the beginning I felt sure of my footing. I didn’t take his whispers seriously and enjoyed his company – he was unaffected, knowledgeable, and kind – and I felt chosen, honoured in a way, to receive so much attention. And then the friendship turned. There must have been a moment, if I can only think hard enough, when I turned from a listening, flattered, indulgent friend into an insecure worker, humiliated in some indefinable way but so thoroughly that I felt myself crack. I can think of a certain moment.
It was nearly midnight and everyone else had gone home. Leonard came over to my desk with his coat on. His small round face was tired and in need of a shave, but he looked keyed-up and strangely intent.
“You have to go?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “And you have to come with me.” His words were firm and deliberate. I think he had practised that line.
“Casablanca,” I said, and his face fell.
“Damn Richard.” Richard had taped a note to the cafeteria wall saying the movie would be on at midnight.
I stood up. Leonard hugged me and I pulled back, careful to do so gradually, but he saw the look on my face.
“It wasn’t to be a test,” he said, nervous, apologetic, giddy. “Just a little game.”
The little game: pretending to take me home to his bed.
Outside it was dark and cool. We walked under leafy trees beside large old houses that were very quiet, but not as quiet as we were. The only word in my head was tired. In his apartment I sat on the sofa, he took the armchair and murmured much of the dialogue: “Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.”
Not long afterwards I dreamt that I was being led into a motel by Leonard. His name was on the register and above it were the names of prostitutes he had brought before. I tried to run away, but the air pulled at my knees so that I barely moved. Then I was walking down the road. Headlights appeared and to my enormous relief it was X, the man I was in love with. He pulled up beside me in his old car. He got out and spoke to me. I think he smiled as he motioned with his head towards the motel. He was trying to get me to go back. I went back.
Leonard’s sexuality filled the office, his retarded yet active sexuality. I rubbed my forehead, drank weak coffee, found it hard to breathe. He called the women in the office Miss Bethie, Miss Susan, Miss Isabel. He brought juice to the “ladies.” Isabel called him the perfect woman’s friend.
Late one night Leonard and I watched Sayonara. Again I sat on the sofa, while from the armchair he made mock-serious comments about “Red Buttons and I.” The next day I was exhausted and disgusted. Suppliant women, I thought to myself. Supple, pliant, malleable, all those l’s, low, before men.
He never asked about the man I lived with and would marry soon, and I never mentioned him. We talked about my dog. Everyone knew (the women, that is, all the women knew) that this was part of Leonard’s code. The women he fell in love with had to be attached, but the men they were attached to had to be shadowy.
I found myself trying to imagine his sexual fantasies. I suspected they were of two kinds: foreign and domestic. I saw him close his eyes and travel by bus through blond Germany or blonder Holland. His seatmate would be a girl of fifteen, alone and poor, heading to the city to keep an appointment. The nature of the appointment would vary, but her need for reassurance wouldn’t. She would be wearing one of her mother’s dresses: yellow polyester covered with Venetian canals, maroon acetate covered with swans.
In his domestic fantasy he would be living on a farm with his sister. They would drink lemonade on hot afternoons, welcome neighbours who dropped by, brush against each other in the hallway. At night he would lie in bed listening to her move around in her bedroom. Her bare feet would be small and smooth, her thin white nightgown just like the one worn by Shirley Jones in Oklahoma.
“I was thinking of you last night,” he would say to me in the morning.
The perfect woman’s friend. I came upon him once right after one of his headaches had lifted. He was at his desk, and it must have been around six in the evening because the office was empty. He looked spent. He looked like a man who had just made love. He reached for my hand and pulled me into his lap.
A year ago I was at my desk writing to old friends to tell them I had moved to Ottawa. I reached for my address book and it fell open to Leonard Brooks. His name coiled in black ink off the page. His address was less than a dozen blocks away.
I made myself walk down his street. It took several months to screw up my courage and even then my heart was pounding. A block short of his building, I chickened out and cut over to another street. Some weeks after that I made myself go all the way. This time I took in the stone façade, the old-fashioned windows with their many small panes, the recessed entranceway. I even looked up to the fifth floor and imagined him looking down at me. The building suited him. It was older than his apartment in Toronto, but he was older and so was I. Although it seemed to me that we had always been old, two little old people on little old canes.
At the corner there was a café not unlike one we had gone to in Toronto. From the outside it looked innocuous, white curtains hung in the window and rubber plants occupied the sill. Inside – I’m speaking of the Toronto café now – it was all chrome and leather, muscles and sleek hair. Leonard gave me his mock-alarm look and reached for my hand. “You won’t leave me, will you?” The contrast between us and the others delighted him, and depressed me more than I can say.
We sat in rose-coloured light and he told me the story he had told me the day before. “Yes, you were telling me this yesterday.” But he didn’t stop. He had been waiting for the streetcar at College and Yonge on Sunday night. An elderly woman waited beside him, the only other person at the stop. They got on the streetcar together, they got off at the same place, they entered the same restaurant, and they ate their suppers alone. He was overwhelmed by the pity of it.
I knew what he wanted. The knowledge made me stubborn and cruel, full of an anger all the more powerful for not having been there a moment before. Even so, he was still my boss, and when he talked about the others in the office, when he said that Isabel and I were better than he was when he started, I looked up at him pained. Didn’t he see that I was much better than Isabel?
Over dessert he went on about a party he had gone to the night before. He stressed what good talkers and interesting people his friends were, that he too had been pretty funny. I was too insecure and self-absorbed to understand the edge to his remarks. I felt the edge without understanding it. I felt hurt. I felt diminished in comparison, and compared deliberately, as I made conversation and he didn’t listen.
The street was almost deserted. Toronto at ten on a Tuesday night. We walked to the corner and paused.
He said, “I don’t know what I said over dinner, but something I said bothered you.”
I shook my head. “The best thing you can do for me is not to pay attention to all of my moods.”
He didn’t walk me home. That was the aberration.
At my desk, ten feet from Leonard, I keep my eyes on my work. The office is bright. Several large windows look east and provide a home for long-legged and untended plants. An old office with old paint and old desks, a peaceful office when he isn’t here. I type on soft green carbon paper and feel myself topple behind my skin.
How empty and sad to be in a B movie, playing the sort of mild blonde who appeals to mild men. I feel myself going – about to behave badly, bang the table, sulk, tumble apart as the pins holding me together pop.
The office is in the centre of town. From time to time Leonard still asks me to have dinner with him. At the end of the meal he always says, “I tip big,” as he tips small.
This is the scene of our long, pathetic, unconsummated courtship which is variously a courtship and not a courtship in his mind, and variously a courtly friendship and a burden in mine.
“He was in love with you,” Susan told me years later. We were in a restaurant with a wagon-wheel motif eating oversized New York sandwiches, slowly.
“Maybe. Until he fell in love with someone else.”
“No, I don’t think so. I think he changed because you got married.”
The wedding took place on a lawn under a tent and towards evening it began to rain. For a while Leonard sat beside me. He seemed wistful but not unhappy. He came late and didn’t stay long.
At this stage, the summer of the wedding, I couldn’t read him any more. He was still friendly, still attentive, but not as much as before. It was hard to measure, but I measured it somehow, sensed it. Later, when I pieced together his withdrawal, I found nothing overt, just a gradual diminution of attention, my sense of humiliation, and déjà vu.
I asked X about it. He had known Leonard longer than I had and one day I found myself talking about him. We were on Bloor Street walking towards Yonge. X was wearing sandals, summer pants, a white shirt open at the neck, and sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He always looked casually graceful to me. As usual my seriousness made him bemused and a little bored. I said, “You see, Leonard makes me feel so lonely.”
“Explain.”
At the corner of Yonge and Bloor he stopped to buy an ice cream bar from a street vendor. Only after buying it did he ask me with a look whether I wanted one. I shook my head.
“He’s such shifting ground,” I said. “His attentions are so hard to assess. Sometimes he’s more attentive than other times. I mean it’s always platonic, you know that, but his attentions fluctuate and that makes me less certain of myself and where I stand, and it makes me terribly lonely.”
“I don’t really understand that.”
“Well, I’m being so inarticulate.”
But of course my confusion was the message, and my need to be reassured that Leonard was the one who was screwed up.
“It’s embarrassing talking this way. But I might as well.”
“Of course.”
“Lately he’s drawn away from me. I think it’s because I’m getting married.”
“No. I noticed it before that.”
“Then why?”
“It could be two things, no three. I have three hypotheses,” and X smiled at me. “First, he doesn’t like you as much any more. Second, you responded too warmly and that scared him away. Or third, he exchanged his crush on you for a crush on Susan.”
The humiliation was complete.
So there was no defining moment as such. My friendship with Leonard turned over time, until finally all it was was something turning in my mind.
In the wagon-wheel restaurant Susan pushed her plate to one side, and I stared at the nearly untouched brisket, itching to eat it, but too, too what? The word timid hardly covers the territory. She fingered the collar of her shiny pink blouse, a practical successful woman whose self-sufficiency appals her friends – leaves us gasping at her feet like fish.
She said, “You don’t really care about Leonard, do you?”
I looked away, over the heads of everyone in the restaurant to the corridor filled with shoppers. The restaurant was below ground in one of those huge office buildings on Fifth Avenue. It should have been in Calgary. What were wagon wheels doing in New York? She repeated her question. “You don’t really care?” I was thinking about the half-life of old friendships, the residue. In my mind the friendship was still something, but out loud it was less than nothing.
“You have to understand that we were buddies,” I said. But maybe we were buddies only in my mind.
Then I said something else, and my voice was so hard and angry that Susan smiled.
“I hate Leonard Brooks. I hate how he treated me. I hate how I behaved. I should have had more self-respect. You did.”
“He was in love with you,” Susan repeated.
I looked at her.
“I could tell by the way he talked about you.”
I grabbed on to this. It mattered more than anything to me. Why should it matter so much?
Why should it matter? An odd sad competition, this one of who cared most and in what way. I’ve spent so long looking for an explanation that will show me in a better light and always I come to the same conclusion. I did Leonard’s bidding as a friend and I do his bidding as a non-friend. What is it about me – this is the question – that draws his sort of attention?
My words were I hate Leonard. And Susan smiled.
“I’ve always thought of Leonard as a victim,” she said. Which made me a victim’s victim.
I leave the window and walk down to the Rideau River. It smells old. Runners go by, their feet on soft dirt. I find a bench out of the wind and watch sparrows peck the ground until someone shoves a leaflet into my hand. I look up, the man moves on. A religious tract with a picture of Billy Graham in a pulpit. Leonard loved Billy Graham, not the message so much as the power to move a crowd. That was Leonard’s skill – manipulative innocence – playing now to an empty house. I wasn’t the only one who got tired of him.
There was the time he wanted a western sandwich on brown and wanted someone to accompany him while he got it. He came up to me, put his arm around my shoulder and jerked me towards him. No, I said. He laid his head on my shoulder and looked up at me with dog-pleading eyes. I wanted to swat him. I said no and I pulled away.
He apologized later. Not in so many words. He came up to me in the afternoon and with a gentle smile talked about baseball and Bob Hope.
At a baseball game the smell of the lake blew over – between cigar smoke, peanut smell, Leonard’s breath – caught by the wind and blown into my face.
I saw him again. Again I was in the library. I was coming out of the stacks and I spotted a woman I knew waiting at the librarian’s desk. I paused to remember her name and saw Leonard standing to one side and in her company. My mouth open with the unsaid hello, I dodged behind a pillar.
Behind the pillar my thoughts took this form: You are the most cowardly shit on the face of the earth. Suppose they know you’re here? Suppose someone else knows? You are a grown woman. How can you be such a coward?
Nevertheless, I stayed behind the pillar. I even pretended to read the announcements pinned to its surface. When I had collected myself sufficiently to face them – to go out and greet them both – they were gone.
A month went by and it was June. One evening on Wellington Street a friend and I got caught in a sudden thunderstorm: it pounded the sidewalk with such force that by the time we reached the library our pants and feet (my brown suede shoes) were black with water. In the lobby I looked up after lowering my umbrella and Leonard was five feet away: he was coming out of the cloakroom and he saw me the moment I saw him.
“Leonard.”
“Now why did I think,” said he, “that I might see you here?”
I smiled. He smiled. I kissed him on the cheek and he began to talk, a steady patter into my ear and not a word to my friend. In the auditorium I sat between them, knees spread slightly apart because so wet, shoes sopping, waiting for the author who came on stage and read, strangely enough, about Peter Rabbit’s shoes. In the story a five-year-old girl sits under a lilac bush reading Peter Rabbit. She looks up and sees Peter, who asks her about his lost shoes. She just happens to have them in her hand. Peter and his shoes have come off the page.
We stood in the lobby, dripping wet, and compared our shoes. “And mine are suede,” I said twice. But Leonard was too busy talking to listen. He remained talking all the way into the auditorium, up the aisle and into our seats. Talk, talk, talk into my ear so that I couldn’t even turn to my friend (though once, in mid-Leonard sentence, I touched her arm and asked stupidly, “Are you still wet?”) and so my friend was forced into silence by Leonard’s talk and my complicitous listening. Out of courtesy, I was rude.
And always the question. How do we extricate ourselves? How do we get to the gate?
I looked down at his little black shoes – a small man, how small I’d forgotten – and his pant legs wet to the knee. He claimed not to have noticed how wet he was while my friend and I couldn’t notice anything else, so wet were we. “And mine are suede,” I said.
I had never seen us so clearly. Never seen so clearly his nervous insecurity, his self-centredness, his profound rudeness. Bachelor hustle yes. Spoiled yes. But not how he took me over. Monopolized me. Staked his claim.
Not just my passivity, but his active claiming.
Am I right to think it was nervousness that kept him speaking? His running chatter about a piano, his running anecdote about a concert, his well-shaped monologue which I chose to contradict. And right to think that my contradiction was responsible for his retreat?
We were in the garden, our feet soaking wet from the rain, hiding in flower pots and trying to escape. After the reading we moved out into the aisle. I moved ahead with my friend, Leonard fell back. I took care not to notice where he went and he vanished without a trace.
Never without a trace. Several more months went by and I attended a party for a friend who was moving away. I entered the living room and Leonard was standing there in his grey-green suit. He said, “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” in a tentative-meaningful way that made me smile.
There he was, affectionate, intrusive, unsettling: the qualities that marked our friendship virtually from the beginning, and from which I withdrew over time and courteously, then over more time and less courteously, so that in the end it seemed to me that he was the one who withdrew and I was left to feel pained by the very outcome I had worked to create.
We sat side by side on the off-white sofa in the off-white living room with the fireplace blazing and various glass tables sending off reflections. A prosperous and successful setting for two people who always think of themselves as poor. It was easy to fall into the old shoe of each other’s company. I asked him what movies he had been watching, then began to tell him about seeing A Country Girl when I was five, but he stopped me. “I remember you speaking about that,” he said. “Clifford Odets, 1954.”
“Ah yes. I was thinking Terence Rattigan.”
“No. Terence Rattigan wrote Separate Tables and,” he added with a heavy sigh, “The Browning Version.”
I did what was expected of me. “The Browning Version?” I asked, my voice soft, interested, receptive. I coiled into his ear and for the next half hour he retold the story of Crocker-Harris, the failed schoolmaster about to retire early because of heart trouble. The joke among the students is that the Crock, who has no heart, has heart trouble. Only one student, Taplow, shows any compassion. On the last day of school Taplow brings him a gift, Browning’s version of the Agamemnon. The Crock – who has learned only minutes before that the school has refused him a pension, and has known all along that his wife Millie is having an affair with Frank the science teacher – is so moved by the gift that he breaks down. He cries.
Until this moment Leonard has been telling the story in summary. He is seated in the corner of the sofa, his hands folded on his crossed knees, his small head slumped into his small shoulders, lost in the recollection of a movie and not unaware that he has the perfect audience in this not-so-young woman who has let him down. “You always had this effect on me,” he will say later after retelling the story has reduced him to tears. “You always had this effect on me,” in a tone of nostalgic reproach.
He catches his breath, stops speaking, then picks up again, this time with Millie’s words when she learns that the gift is from Taplow.
“Let me see,” she says. Then: “The artful little beast!”
“Why artful, Millie?”
Leonard gives the words Michael Redgrave’s intonation. Redgrave is a good actor and Leonard is a good storyteller.
“Because, my dear, I came in this morning to find Taplow giving an imitation of you to Frank here. I don’t blame him for trying a few shillings’ worth of appeasement.”
Leonard takes her speech very slowly for emphasis, and is undone. I watch him, but he doesn’t look at me. He stares ahead, eyes blinking, mouth working a little, fingers laced together across his knee. I watch from my vantage point on his right, perched slightly forward on the sofa and turned towards him.
He recovers and continues, step by step through the movie, to the climax where the Crock gives a farewell speech in front of the school. He has prepared a speech but once on stage he loses its thread. Faced by a sea of students and teachers who despise him for being a failure, he finally says, “I am sorry for letting you down.”
Last night I watched the movie. It was late and I was just as tired as I used to be in the days when Leonard and I worked those long hours together. How much, I wonder, is everything that goes wrong a factor of fatigue? Would we feel so many doubts and humiliations if we could just get a good night’s sleep?
The movie ended at midnight. I took a sleeping pill, drank a cup of hot milk (lying back against two pillows with the hot white cup between my fingers) and went to sleep. In the morning it was raining. It had been dry for weeks and now it wasn’t any more.
I woke thinking of the applause the Crock received for being an object of pity. He stood nakedly speechless, then humbly honest in front of everyone, and received louder and more sustained applause than the cricket hero who spoke before him. These dramatists. How they set us up. Next I’ll be watching Moulin Rouge.
A few tears came to my eyes, for what they’re worth. Some sympathy, for what it’s worth. But in general I felt calm. Not exactly wise to Leonard, not exactly wise to myself, not exactly out of danger, but uninvolved and unalarmed.
It’s still raining. Trees are in half-leaf, tulips wide open. Reality is a wonderful thing, it seems to me. Daylight, and Leonard in the flesh. He has come out of my side and is standing, now, on his own small feet. For a moment he removes his glasses and wipes his eyes with his fingertips. “You always had this effect on me,” he says.
Is this what soothes me? His admission that I have had an effect? Because I feel soothed.
I sit close to him, our knees almost touch, in a room where we have more in common with each other than with anyone else. But I’m not drawn in. I feel him come out of my side and almost hear the tiny pop.
Little more than a stone’s throw away, across the bridge and down a tree-lined street, he comes out onto his balcony. It has stopped raining and the air is sweet. I can’t see him, but I know he’s there. He can’t see me, but he knows I’m here. He leans against the railing and then he raises his arms. His Loneliness raises his arms and blesses all those gathered below. After being blessed, they walk away.
This is the image I have in my head. I don’t know whether it’s my wishful thinking or Leonard’s. I don’t know whether it’s cruel or kind.