Lesje is having lunch with Elizabeth’s husband, the husband belonging to Elizabeth. Possessive, or, in Latin, genitive. This man doesn’t seem like Elizabeth’s husband, or anyone else’s for that matter. But especially not Elizabeth’s. Elizabeth, for instance, would never have chosen the Varsity Restaurant. Either he has no money, which is possible considering the frayings and ravelings everywhere on his surface, patchy, like rock lichen; or he doesn’t think she’ll base her opinion of him on his choice of restaurants. It’s a restaurant left over when others like it became classy, preserving its fifties furnishings, its grubby menus, its air of cheesy resignation.
Ordinarily Lesje would never eat here, partly because she associates the Varsity Restaurant with being a student and she’s no longer that young. She isn’t sure why she’s having lunch with Elizabeth’s husband at all, except that something in the way he asked her — the invitation had been a kind of outburst — made it impossible for her to say no.
The anger and desperation of others have always been her weak points. She’s an appeaser and she knows it. Even in the women’s group she went to in graduate school, mostly because her roommate shamed her into it, she’d been cautious, afraid of saying the wrong thing; of being accused. She’d listened with mounting horror to the recitals of the others, their revelations about their grievances, their sex lives, the callousness of their lovers, even their marriages, for some of them were married. The horror wasn’t caused by the content but by Lesje’s realization that they were expecting her to do the same thing. She knew she couldn’t, she didn’t know the language. It would be no good to say that she was just a scientist, she wasn’t political. According to them, everything was political.
Already they were looking at her with calculation: her murmurs of assent had not been enough. Soon they would confront her. Panic-stricken, she searched her past for suitable offerings, but the only thing she could think of was so minor, so trivial, that she knew it would never be accepted. It was this: On the gold dome of the Museum’s lobby, up at the top, it said: THAT ALL MEN MAY KNOW HIS WORK. It was only a quotation from the Bible, she’d checked on that, but it might keep them busy; they were very big on the piggishness of God. On the other hand, they might reject it completely. Come on, Lesje. Something personal.
She’d told her roommate, who was a social historian with tinted granny glasses, that she didn’t really have time for the group, as her palynology course was heavier than she’d thought. Neither of them believed this, and shortly afterwards Lesje moved into a single apartment. She couldn’t stand the constant attempts to engage her in meaningful dialogue while she was eating her cornflakes or drying her hair. At that time nuances had bothered her; she was much happier among concrete things. Now she feels it might have been useful to have listened more carefully.
Nate hasn’t yet frightened her by asking her to tell him about herself, though he’s been talking since they sat down. She ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, a grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of milk. She listens, eating in small bites, concealing her teeth. Nate has given no hint yet as to why he called her. At the time she thought it might be because she’d known Chris, she knew Elizabeth, and he needed to talk about it. She could understand that. But so far he hasn’t mentioned either of them.
Lesje can’t see how he can get through a conversation, even five minutes of one, without mentioning an event that to her would have loomed very large in the foreground. If it were her life, which it isn’t. Until this lunch, this grilled cheese sandwich and — what is he eating? — a hot turkey sandwich on white bread, she thought about Nate, if at all, simply as the least interesting figure in that tragic triangle.
Elizabeth, who stalks about the Museum these days white-skinned, eyes black-shadowed, a little too plump to carry it off entirely but otherwise like some bereft queen out of a Shakespearean play, is of course the most interesting. Chris is interesting because he is dead. Lesje knew him, but not very well. Some people at work found him remote, others too intense. He was rumored to have a ferocious temper, but Lesje never saw it. She worked on only one project with him: Smaller Mammals of the Mesozoic. It’s finished now, installed in its glass case with push buttons wired for the voices. Lesje did the specifications and Chris built the models, using muskrat fur and rabbit and woodchuck, doctored, to cover the wooden forms. She used to visit him in that shadowy workroom, at one end of the corridor where they kept the stuffed owls and the other large birds. Specimens, two of each kind, in little pull-out metal drawers, like an animal morgue. She would bring coffee for both of them and drink hers while he worked, putting the shapes together with wood and Styrofoam. They guessed together about certain details: eyes, colors. It was odd, watching such a massive man concentrate himself on meticulous details. Chris wasn’t unusually tall; he wasn’t even overly muscular. But he gave an impression of mass, as though he would weigh more than anyone else the same size, as if his cells were closer together, squeezed inward by some irresistible gravitational force. Lesje never thought about whether she liked him or not. You don’t like or dislike a boulder.
Now he’s dead and therefore immediately more remote, more mysterious. His death baffles her: she can’t imagine ever doing anything like that herself, and she can’t imagine anyone she knows doing it. Chris seemed like the last person who would. To her at any rate. Though people aren’t her field, so she’s no judge.
But Nate; she hasn’t thought much about Nate. He doesn’t look like a betrayed husband. Right now he’s talking about the election in Québec, which is taking place at this very moment. He bites into a piece of turkey, chews; gravy traces his chin. The Separatists, he feels, ought to win, because the other government is so corrupt. Also because of the notorious behavior of the Federal Government in 1970. Lesje vaguely remembers that some people were arrested, after the kidnappings. She was working very hard on her Invertebrates course at the time; fourth year, and every mark counted.
Does he think it would be a good thing in the long run? Lesje asks. That isn’t the point, Nate says. The point is a moral one.
If William had said this Lesje would have found it pompous. She doesn’t find it pompous now. Nate’s long face (surely he used to have a beard; she recalls a beard, at parties and when he’d come with his children to pick Elizabeth up after work; but the face is hairless, pale), his body hanging from his shoulders like a suit from a hanger, nonchalant, impresses her. He’s older, he must know things, things she can only guess at; he must have accumulated wisdom. His body would be wrinkled, his face has bones. Unlike William’s. William has put on weight since they’ve been living together; his bones are retreating back into his head, behind the soft barricades of his cheeks.
William is against the Parti Québécois because of their wish to flood James Bay and sell the electrical power.
“But the other side is doing that, too,” Lesje said.
“If I lived there I wouldn’t vote for either of them,” William said purely.
Lesje herself doesn’t know how she would vote. She thinks she would probably move, instead. Nationalism of any kind makes her uneasy. In her parents’ house it was a forbidden subject. How could it be otherwise, with the grandmothers both lurking, questioning her separately, waiting to pounce? They’d never met. Both had refused to go to her parents’ wedding, which had been a civil ceremony. But the grandmothers had focused their rage not on their offending children but on each other. As for her, they’d both loved her, she supposes; and both had mourned over her as if she were in some way dead. It was her damaged gene pool. Impure, impure. Each thought she should scrap half her chromosomes, repair herself, by some miracle. Her Ukrainian grandmother, standing in the kitchen behind Lesje while she sat in a chrome and plastic chair reading The Young People’s Book of Stalactites and Stalagmites, brushing her hair, talking to her mother in a language she didn’t understand. Brushing and weeping silently.
“Mum, what’s she saying?”
“She says your hair is very black.”
The Ukrainian grandmother bending to hug her, consoling her for a pain Lesje didn’t yet know she had. She’d been given an egg once by the Ukrainian grandmother, one of the untouchable decorated eggs kept on the mantelpiece along with the family photos in silver-plated frames. The Jewish grandmother, finding it, had smashed the egg with her tiny boots, stamping up and down, a mouse’s rage.
They’re both old women, her mother said. They’ve had hard lives. You can’t change anyone over fifty. Lesje wept over her handful of bright egg fragments while her little grandmother, repentant, stroked her with her brown paws. She bought Lesje another egg, somewhere; which must have cost her more than the money.
Both grandmothers spoke as if they personally had been through the war, had been gassed, raped, run through with bayonets, shot, starved, bombed and cremated, and had by a miracle survived; which wasn’t true. The only one who had actually been there was Aunt Rachel, her father’s sister, older by twenty years, already married and settled by the time the family left. Aunt Rachel was a photograph on her grandmother’s mantelpiece, a plump dumpy-looking woman. She’d been comfortably off, and that was all the picture revealed: comfort. No foreknowledge; that was added much later, by Lesje, guiltily looking. Her father and mother did not discuss Aunt Rachel. What was there to discuss? No one knew what had happened to her. Lesje, although she has tried, cannot imagine her.
Lesje does not say any of this to Nate, who’s explaining to her why the French feel the way they feel. Lesje doesn’t really care why. She just wants to stay out of the way.
Nate has almost finished his turkey sandwich; he hasn’t eaten any of his fries. He’s gazing at the table to the left of Lesje’s water glass, picking apart one of the Varsity Restaurant’s white rolls. His place is scattered with crumbs. Things have to be viewed in a historical context, he says. He abandons the roll and lights a cigarette. Lesje doesn’t like to ask for one — hers are gone, and it’s the wrong time to get up for more — but after a minute he offers her one and even lights it for her, staring at her nose, she feels, which makes her nervous.
She wants to ask: Why am I here? You didn’t really invite me to lunch in this third-rate restaurant to settle the future of the nation, did you? But he’s already signaling for the bill. As they wait for it, he tells her he has two daughters. He says their names and ages, then repeats them, as though reminding himself or making sure she’s got it straight. He’d like to bring them to the Museum some Saturday, he says. They’re very interested in dinosaurs. Could she perhaps show them around?
Lesje doesn’t usually work on Saturdays, but how can she say no? Depriving his children of dinosaurs. She ought to be glad for the chance to spread the word, make converts, but she isn’t: dinosaurs aren’t a religion for her, only a preserve. Also she’s oddly disappointed. There should have been more to it, after all that stuttering on the telephone, this assignation at a restaurant which, she suddenly realizes, Elizabeth can be depended on never to enter. Lesje says politely that she’d be more than delighted to walk Nate’s children through the exhibits and answer any questions they might have. She starts to put on her coat.
Nate pays for the lunch, even though Lesje offers to pick up her half. She would rather pay for the whole lunch. He looks so broke. More importantly, it’s still not at all clear to her what will be expected of her for this gift of a grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of milk; what she is being asked to do or give in return.