My father picked me up at the bus station. I felt awkward at finding him waiting there, hunched against the cold at the side of his car like a footman. Some lightness, the anticipation of greeting, seemed to fall away from him at once when he saw me.
“Come nu bum, with your hair like that.” And already I’d ruined things, could hear in his tone his lost good intentions, his desire, his inability, to get along with me.
We held a gathering at our house on Christmas Eve. A tinselly Christmas tree had been set up in a corner of the living room but there were no presents beneath it, only a plastic manger scene with a tiny cloth-diapered Jesus laid amidst bits of varnished straw.
“Oh, mascalzone!” Gelsomina said. She had three children now, had put on weight and carried herself with a smooth adultness, aggressively good-humoured. “You look like a Beatle with that hair.”
But there was a wariness in people, a forced friendliness I felt deadened in the face of. I tried to bring up the person in me who’d fit in with them but couldn’t find the right gesture or word that might conjure him, even speaking Italian seeming to require a hopeless exertion, my mouth resisting it like a lie.
“Come va, up there in Toronto?”
“Okay, I guess.”
And though I wanted to despise them all I knew I was the one who was lacking, that I’d found no better world to put against their own.
On Christmas morning my father gave me a cheque for five hundred dollars.
“And if you ever come back with your hair like that you can sleep on the street.”
I thought of returning the cheque but couldn’t muster the strength, the outrage, to do so, could see only how far from the point my father was, how he’d misunderstood, how above all he wanted only to be good to me, for me to allow that. In the end I locked myself in the bathroom and cut my hair, Aunt Teresa joking afterwards that the cut had cost my father five hundred dollars.
“Next time he’ll come home with a beard on top of it, and it’ll cost you a thousand.”
“Sì, we’ll see about that.”
But my father had darkened with emotion at Aunt Teresa’s teasing, seemed as afflicted by my capitulation to him as he might have been by my continued resistance.
It seemed pointless now to have come home at all. I’d imagined some vague pleasure in returning, some coming back to myself, yet felt now unsolid as air, without contours. I called no one, could think of no one from high school I wanted to see, instead sitting holed up in front of the television till late into night like someone in hiding. During the days I worked with Rocco and Domenic on the farm – we were steaming the greenhouses to prepare them for the winter crop, spreading long plastic strips down their lengths that blistered like heaving monsters as the steam fed under them. But our conversation was stilted like that of strangers, dwindling finally to silence as the hours of work wore away the obligation we’d felt to speak.
The Sunday after Christmas I visited Rita. I’d bought her a gift, a portable radio, what I’d imagined appropriate for someone approaching her teens.
“That was very thoughtful,” Mrs. Amherst said, but she took it up along with its wrappings almost at once after Rita had opened it and disappeared with it into the basement.
I was left alone with Rita in the living room, sitting across from her like a suitor. I could hear television sounds from the rec room, sensed Elena silently watching there.
“How’s school?”
“Okay, I guess.”
But already I could feel the familiar deadness in my voice.
“I guess you’re in grade seven this year.”
“Yeah, Mrs. Miller, what a drag, she’s so strict.”
We talked a few minutes and then she grew restive, shifted in her seat, pulled down the hem of her dress, shifted again. She seemed burdened, evasive, seemed to sense some expectation in me she couldn’t meet.
“So I guess I’ll see you again at Easter or something. I just wanted to bring your present.”
“Thank you.”
At home I lay on my bed in a kind of stupor, tried to read, decided to take a bath. For a long time I lay perfectly still in the water, letting it smooth out till it held the pale inertness of my body like glass.
I decided to take the morning bus to Toronto the next day, New Year’s Eve.
“Ma come,” my father said, irritated, thinking perhaps I only wanted to get out of work on the farm. “I can’t believe school is starting already.”
“I have some work I have to finish.”
And in the morning we parted as darkly as we’d met, only the silent ride to the station and then I was gone.
I arrived back at the residence in mid-afternoon. The building was deserted, the halls empty, the cafeteria closed. I walked through an arctic cold to a mall near the campus and bought some lunch meat and bread at the Dominion store there, but back in my room left the food in its bag and smoked a joint instead, then smoked a second one.
Afterwards I went to the common room to put my food in the fridge there and watch TV. But some of the Chinese students had gathered there to cook supper, come out of the shadowy existence they’d had during term to take over the common room now like squatters, the air bright with cooking sounds as I came in and with the quick lilting tones of their conversation. At the sight of me there was a hush as if they’d been caught out in some embarrassment or crime; I put my food in the fridge, then retreated at once to my room.
I decided to drop one of the hits of acid I’d got from Tom. When after fifteen minutes or so I felt nothing I dropped the second one as well; and then almost imperceptibly my blood began to quicken. There was a hum in my teeth like the metallic aftertaste of electricity: it promised some slow revelation if I would wait for it, the gradual unfolding of each tiny path and step that led on to the end of things.
I put on my coat and went outside, walking through a blanket of unbroken snow toward the tiny lake at the front of the residence, the cold splitting like water to let me pass. On the lake the ice groaned beneath its cover as I walked, cracks splintering away from each step – I imagined following their jagged progress, imagined being the thin nothing of a crack as it shot through the ice. Then in the centre of the lake I lay down spread-eagled in the snow, staring up into the star-spattered dark of the sky. The snow seemed neither hot nor cold, the sky neither empty nor full. I closed my eyes, floating, and remembered a poem from high school about an old Indian woman left to die in the cold, remembered the teacher describing the slow dreamy warmth of freezing to death.
I lay with eyes closed for a long time, bits of my body seeming to fall away like breakage from an ice floe. Then there were sounds, dream noises; from somewhere a light winked over me.
“Are you all right, son?”
I sat up. There was a man with a flashlight standing at a distance.
“It’s just the snow,” I said.
“What’s that?”
A security guard. I grew aware of where I was, the snowy bushes around the lake, the looming shapes of the university, buildings beyond.
“I just came out for a walk,” I called out, too loud perhaps and yet lucid, pleased for an instant at this picture of reasonableness I’d presented.
“I think you’d better be getting back inside now.”
I slept in the next day, New Year’s, until three. My head felt blasted, hollowed out; I imagined it blown apart like John Kennedy’s, the back of it scooped out like so much meat and bone. I needed to eat but lacked the will to, nibbling on some of the food I’d left in the common room but then smoking a joint and passing the rest of the day in stoned half-awareness in front of the common room TV. A couple of the Chinese students came in at one point but at the sight of me simply removed some food from the fridge and retreated. I wished they’d return with their cooking sounds and talk, imagined them taking me in as in some Christmas story about the sudden unexpected brightening of a life at the brink of despair.
The next day I decided to go downtown to buy more acid from Tom, the prospect of a goal heartening me. But when I reached Tom’s building there was a crowd gathered in front: someone had jumped. The body still lay there on the pavement, lumped like a sack in the circle of space enclosed by the crowd – a woman perhaps, or a girl, though someone had draped a parka over her and only the back of the head showed, a mat of black hair with a line of pale scalp at the parting. A smudge of blood had coloured the pavement near the head, frugally though, hardly visible against the pavement’s wet brown.
There was a strange tension in the crowd, a muted, gloomy excitement.
“There’s one or two every New Year’s,” someone said.
This was not how I’d imagined it, at once so mundane and so chilling, the crowd, the strange tension, the body crumpled anonymous on the pavement as in a scene from a movie, as unreal, as distant from me, as that. Yet she had had a life as I did, had moved, thought, been human, and still had managed to cross the gap that kept the thought from the act, been able to open the window, to lift herself over the sill.
The police came, then an ambulance.
“Just move along, folks, the show’s over.”
I walked away from the building toward downtown. It had begun to snow, the flakes swirling in the halos of streetlights in the twilight chill; I wanted only to be warm, inside, alone. I stopped to eat at a Harvey’s, the man in the booth beside me unfolding a wrinkled picture of Jesus, smoothing it meticulously, carefully folding it again.
The next day Verne returned from the break and stopped by my room.
“Hey, Vic, how were the holidays?”
“All right, I guess.”
But I couldn’t bear the deadness in me when I spoke. The line between present and future, who I was and who I imagined I’d be, seemed dissolved; I saw only the endless perpetuation of things as they were, my small illusory rallies, my steep descents.
I thought: I will do it. There seemed nothing between the thought and the act now but empty space; I would come to the point where I’d crossed it.
There was a notice in the residence lobby for the university’s counselling clinic. I had seen it a hundred times, had somehow assumed it had nothing to do with me; but now its message stuck. For several days I circled around the idea as around an enemy, trying to find its weakness; and then one day I was simply there in the centre’s office.
The receptionist was cheerful, condescending.
“What can I do for you today?”
I had to fill out a form. I imagined the impression I made, a mental case, gloomy, unshaven, my hair spiky and uneven from the crude cut I’d given it.
I was assigned a young woman in a loose, flowered maxi and a muslin blouse, a hippie type.
“Hello, Victor, I’m Marnie.”
I followed her down a narrow corridor, then another. She walked with a slow, long-strided tranquillity; with each stride her thighs shimmered briefly into shape against the fabric of her skirt.
“You’ll have to excuse the office,” she said. “I have to share it with another student. Very straight.”
She gave me a smile of complicity. Her candour made me uneasy, made me feel she’d assumed some affinity between us that I had to live up to now.
The office was small and cramped, institutional; two metal desks had been lined up against the walls as if stored there. I sat on a black vinyl couch and Marnie across from me in a large desk chair, her legs pulled up beneath her.
“So. What would you like to talk about?”
I had rehearsed a hundred different responses but they all struck me as false now exactly because I’d rehearsed them.
“I dunno. I guess I haven’t been feeling very good and stuff.”
“Emotionally or physically?”
“Emotionally, I guess.”
Marnie nodded, slow, reassuring, seeming a careful impersonation of what a counsellor was.
“How would you say you felt? Sad? Depressed?”
“Depressed, I guess.”
“Was there something that happened, something that made you depressed?”
“No, I dunno. It’s just that things didn’t go very well last term, I started smoking up and stuff.”
Everything had started wrong. I’d made her think I was inarticulate, simple-minded, had the sense I was inventing some other person, not me, as I spoke. We went on to talk about school, about friends, about doing drugs, and yet everything I said seemed at once true and beside the point. Mirrored back to me through her my problems appeared unambiguous, two-dimensional: I was merely lonely, merely shy, merely depressed.
But at the end of the session she reached out and set a hand on my knee.
“It sounds like you’re pretty bummed out,” she said, and there seemed even through her sad-eyed counsellor’s earnestness such a bald recognition of how I felt that my throat tightened with emotion.
I began to see her every week. After the first few sessions the hope of some sudden impending change in me began to fade: I’d expected her to take me up through my life as through a film of it, building toward some final resolution, but each session seemed a new beginning, brought out the same inarticulateness in me, the same evasions. Somehow I couldn’t strike the spot that would crack open the truth of things, felt always a swerving, the instant I came up against what I couldn’t put into words and took refuge in what was merely acceptable, a second-guessing of what Marnie might expect from me. What kept me going at first was only the relief at each session’s end: I muddled through, hardly speaking sometimes, hardly able to string together two honest words, and then came out at the end as into fresh air again, seeming somehow to leave the worst part of myself in Mamie’s office till the following week.
We talked about my wanting to kill myself. I held back at first, afraid of exceeding the bounds of what Marnie might find acceptable; but then when she reacted with her predictable calm I felt a kind of disappointment.
“You have the right to decide to kill yourself. Some people make that choice. But I want you to promise you’ll call me first if you ever feel close to it. Anywhere, any time. I’ll give you my number at home.”
Something in me shrank from taking on this responsibility to her, felt as if in a breath she’d acknowledged my right to kill myself and then made me surrender it to her. And yet the instant obstacle now of that imagined call seemed to serve its purpose, already making the thing seem unlikely as soon as the thought came to mind.
There was a mat-lined room around the corner from Mamie’s office where we did body work. I’d stand on one leg, one hand lightly holding Mamie’s for balance, and let myself fall when I grew tired; I’d get down on all fours, Mamie’s hand on my belly like an ember at the centre of me, and let the muscles relax in my belly and groin. Marnie seemed to think of the body as an extension of the earth, talking about reconnecting with the earth’s gravity; and there was something comforting in this vision of things, its animal freedom, the mind seeming a tiny place within it, merely the last refuge of the body’s slow self-forgetting. But while I could grasp the sense of her theories, somehow I couldn’t muster the faith to surrender myself to the truth of them. In the exercise room once, Marnie had me crouch on the floor and then without explanation draped herself over me like a sack, her breasts, her groin, pressing into me, the weight of her slowly closing me down; and though I could guess her intent, knew I ought to heed my body’s slow scream for release, still I couldn’t find the true moment in me when instinct and thought overlapped.
“I think it would be a good idea if you tried to get me off of you.”
There were other exercises, word associations, role playing; and then the grittier work of looking at my week, my life, the slow haphazard foraging in the past. I wanted to dredge to the bottom of me, bring up all my anger and hate, everything that was missing in words like “lonely” and “shy”; but echoed back through Marnie my reactions to things seemed at every point understandable, predictable, sane.
“What I’m hearing from you is you didn’t feel you had the right to break up with her, that you felt trapped because of that, that that’s where your anger was coming from.”
And in the end these statements seemed not so much solutions we’d groped towards as a coming back, the discovery merely of the shape I’d arranged things around from the start, always the sense in me afterwards of some darkness I hadn’t stepped into, a line I hadn’t crossed.
She asked about my mother’s death. It was the issue we’d seemed to circle around from the start, that I could feel Marnie drawing me back toward with a textbook determinedness. But though I’d thought I could simply set out all the facts with a spare, unsentimental concision, recreate whole the slow unfolding of my mother’s disgrace, of her death, now that the matter sat clearly before me there seemed a lapse in my memory like a hole in it. I could hardly call up an image of her, could remember only flickering details like the lingering fragments of a dream, the echo of footsteps in a hall, two eyes staring out from a stable door. I had the sense for an instant that I’d mistakenly thought of as real some story I’d only imagined.
“I dunno,” I said finally, “I guess I don’t really remember much, I was pretty young and stuff.”
Marnie was sitting straight-backed across from me, intent but also oddly self-contained. I thought of her thinking of me, trying to make me out, and felt a throb of affection for her like a pain.
“Victor, look at yourself, how you’re sitting.”
I had huddled into a corner of the couch, my knees up and my arms wrapped around them, a parody of withdrawal.
“The few times you’ve mentioned your mother it’s been the same, your whole body just closes right down.”
I expected some gloss from her, some pointing out of the obvious, but she let the moment hang silent between us.
“I guess our time’s up,” she said finally.
Then already we’d begun to approach the end of spring term. We continued on as before but something had changed, the sense of working toward any revelation. I seemed under the full tyranny by now of the image I thought Marnie had formed of me, the complex dynamic of wanting her good opinion and not believing in it, of silently holding her in contempt for it and yet daring less and less to expose it to any risk.
And yet I’d got on with my life, had felt from the outset of my visits a kind of temporary reprieve as if the final question of my worth had been suspended for the time being by them; and then slowly I’d begun to make friends, to do well in my classes, till gradually the largeness of my despair had seemed to dissolve into the everydayness of things, into my small, familiar frustrations and hopes. Nothing had happened and yet everything after all had changed, not the making over I’d hoped for but the subtle shifting of things that made them once again bearable.
We came to our final session. Marnie was just finishing a Master’s and would be leaving the university at the end of term, but she suggested I call her at home when I got back in the fall.
“I’d like to see you again,” she said. “As a friend.”
“Okay. That would be nice.”
There was an instant’s awkwardness when I got up to leave and then we hugged.
“I feel kind of teary,” Marnie said, and laughed. She seemed genuinely moved, her eyes glistening. I hadn’t expected this from her, saw our whole time together skew as if it had grown suddenly real, as if I’d missed till then some crucial element in it, some crucial possibility.
“I guess maybe we’ll see each other in the fall,” I said.
“That would be nice.”
But already walking back across campus I’d let her slip from my mind, felt only the niggling residue of her, the strange lingering pleasure and guilt of parting.